


Journal of Aedan Cousland

by IncantationFetter



Series: Dragon Age [1]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Canon Compliant, Diary/Journal, Dragon Age Spoilers, Multi, Original Character-centric, POV Original Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2020-11-29 00:57:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 53,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20953832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IncantationFetter/pseuds/IncantationFetter
Summary: This is a diary inspired by the events of one of my Dragon Age: Origins playthroughs, and its written with non-players in mind, as a way of allowing them, too, to experience the world and story.  All the game lore is explained in the text, and there are no clever deviations or what-ifs to breathe fresh air into the story for longtime fans.  Some of the game choices I made are admittedly a bit non-standard (siding with templars, werewolves, etc.), and I do flesh out the personal relationships and inner life of the characters quite a bit, but aside from that there's probably little here for people who have played the game multiple times.  If you've been curious about Thedas but don't want to play the game, you're in the right place!





	1. The Grey Warden

9 Drakonis

Location: Highever Castle  
Weather: Spring has gone running back behind winter’s skirts for a day.  
Health: Good  
Temper: Foul  
Events: Visit of Arl Howe and Grey Warden Duncan

It is a sad day indeed when a young man loses all trust in the wisdom and good judgment of his elders. Today is that day for me.

When Father passes, Fergus will be the second most important man in Ferelden (not counting the royal family), which is why he has been trained all his life to manage a teyrnir and I to serve as a general in its defense. Although I would be the first to admit that for many years I resented being born second, if pressed I would say that Fergus and I have grown splendidly into our roles. I am still a better leader than warrior, and Fergus the reverse, but we are both well-prepared for our respective destinies. 

So why, unfortunate reader, has Father ordered me to stay and manage the teyrnir while he and Fergus run off to fight darkspawn to the south? What manner of idiot sends the heir into battle and leaves the spare safely at home playing teyrn? Is he trying to incite resentment in both of us? Give his eldest a teasing taste of adventure and his second-born a heady sip of power, then expect them both to meekly trade places again by summer?

To make matters worse, a Grey Warden is here--they have a tendency to run about recruiting when darkspawn show themselves in numbers--and Father rather swiftly shut down the Warden’s idea that I might be an excellent candidate for the order. Warden Duncan is here to test Ser Gilmore, it seems, and I am not even allowed a trial. Even a second-born is too “precious,” apparently, to be squandered on such petty things as an oath to save the world from evil.

Arl Howe is visiting while he awaits his troops; when they arrive, they shall join Father’s in the field at Ostagar. I suppose I should count my blessings that the arl left the rest of his family safely in Amaranthine. The only Howe I’d have liked to see again is Nathaniel, but I think he's set on staying in the Free Marches for life. Little Thomas has always struck me as a half-wit, and I find myself in a precarious situation regarding Delilah. For years I have implied that I remained unmarried because Delilah was not yet of age... and now apparently she’s come of age. Time, you damned thief. 

I’ll need to come up with an excuse to reject her that won’t sour relations between Highever and Amaranthine. Despite the fondness Howe claims his daughter has for me, neither she nor I have anything to gain from such a union. She’d be married to a warrior, likely end up a widow, and I’d be expected to sire children on a woman I feel as much attraction to as I do to the scarecrow in the wheatfield.

Sadly, I have already met all of the women my father believes suitable matches for me, and none of them interest me in the slightest, so I’d rather not marry at all. No matter; Fergus has a fine start at making more Couslands.

Speaking of which, poor Oriana is worried half out of her mind about Fergus. Oren, like all children his age, just wants to know what his father will bring back for him, but Antivan women’s feelings run so deeply! Oriana’s in such a state that I’m going to have to avoid her for the entirety of Fergus’s absence lest my concern cause me to behave too affectionately toward her. That crack in my heart has long since mended, but it’s still difficult to see her in such distress.

Maker forgive me for the way my mind wanders in worry, myself. I’ve long known that the death of my brother would open a path to both of my thwarted adolescent dreams, but the horror of imagining life without him has always splashed cold water on such musings. Now his loss looms as a very real possibility, and if I don’t fill my mind with something else while he is gone I may be stark raving mad by the time he returns.

16 Drakonis

  
Location: Hinterlands  
Weather: Cold  
Health: Good  
Temper: Despondent  
Events: Fall of Highever Castle, Recruitment into Grey Wardens

I am traveling with Duncan of the Grey Wardens, soon to join the battle at Ostagar as one of them. If Fergus still lives, I shall find him there and tell him that his wife and son are murdered. 

I woke to the sound of Bricks growling, low and ominous, in the small hours of the night not long after my last entry. Two of Howe’s men burst in upon me before I had even dressed. Thank the Maker that Bricks was able to dispense with them so that I could arm and armor myself and slaughter my way to my family’s rooms, for all the good it did anyone.

Howe’s men spared no one. The castle was as drenched with gore as a battlefield: every room, every bed hanging, every bookshelf splattered red. Howe’s men cut through not just my family but nurses and cooks and guards and lady’s maids, as mindless as scythes at harvest time. I still have no idea why. 

I do see how the absence of our troops presented an opportunity, but the thoroughness of the violence--no prisoners, no hostages--suggests something other than merely ambition, some long-festering hatred that blindsided us all. But Howe was always so cordial to us, jocular, even. He and Father fought side by side in the rebellion against Orlais. I do not understand. May never understand.

And I am still not certain how I feel about Warden Duncan’s aid in my escape. I am humbled to be chosen for the Grey Wardens, but I resent how opportunistically Duncan recruited me as my father lay bleeding out on the stone floor of his castle. The Warden told us that the evil that rises in this world dwarfs even Howe’s massacre, that the coming Blight must be stopped, and that a man of my strength and courage could make all the difference. I was in no state of mind to argue this or any other point, and surely he knew that.

For a day or two afterward I quietly suspected him of complicity with Howe, but after a week’s travel with him I begin to see that, right or wrong, he cares nothing whatsoever for politics. He truly sees my family’s deaths as small matters. It makes me wonder: on exactly what scale is he accustomed to envisioning tragedy?

When I close my eyes I see the way Oriana’s arm was thrown over Oren’s body, as if such a slender thing could shield him. 

It is cold, and my hand is shaking. My writing will soon become illegible, so if there is more to say about the fall of Highever it will have to wait.

18 Drakonis

Location: Ostagar  
Weather: Chill creeping mist  
Health: Good  
Temper: Somber  
Events: Introduction to fellow Warden recruits, Meeting with Teyrn Loghain Mac Tir of Gwaren

It seems all of Ferelden is represented here at Ostagar. Chantry, Circle of Magi, Ash Warriors, nobles’ armies, and of course the Grey Wardens. The young golden-haired king himself is sunnily presiding as though he were the master of ceremonies at an ambassador’s reception; it is nothing short of bizarre. Rumors abound, however, that behind the scenes he and Teyrn Loghain are involved in constant shouting matches, not only about battle strategy but something to do with Queen Anora as well. 

Unfortunate reader, in case you live at some hard-to-imagine distant point of posterity: Queen Anora is Teyrn Loghain’s daughter. While she is reportedly beloved of the people--I myself have never known the honor of her presence--she has not a drop of noble blood. Loghain was some sort of farmer who earned the rights to the abandoned teyrnir of Gwaren not by right of blood but by his (admittedly spectacular) military exploits during Ferelden’s war for independence from Orlais. He then proceeded to marry a cabinet-maker of all things and raise her to the position of teyrna. 

I can only imagine that young King Cailan, last scion of the ancient blood of Calenhad, might occasionally rebel against being saddled with the (seemingly barren) offspring of a farmer and a carpenter, but this, unfortunate reader, is pure speculation on my part and should not be entered into the annals of history.

For we are making history here, are we not? If you have suffered through volumes upon volumes of my childish whinging about unrequited affections and harsh swordmasters, you have at last found the diamond amongst the manure, a first-hand view of the events at Ostagar in the chill spring of 9:31. My impressions are as follows: 

LOUD. 

Maker’s breath, my aching head. The Chantry’s faithful intone prayers, mages chant their unnerving rituals, blight-tainted dogs howl in pain, merchants bark orders at elven servants, soldiers sing and laugh and bellow as though sheer volume will drown out their fears. A few moments do stand out from the constant din as worth recording, however. Warden Duncan was kind enough to look after Bricks, which freed me to explore the camp at my leisure while we waited for everyone to gather for the Grey Warden initiation. 

For the first time, I spoke both with an elder Circle Mage and with one of the Tranquil, face to face. Separately, not together. The mage--I have already forgotten her name--could not have been less like my mother, and yet the raw wound left by Mother’s recent loss drew me to the maternal aura this slim white-haired woman projected. Does the Chantry even allow mages to have children? Perhaps there was a matching emptiness in her, for while mages are allegedly eccentric and mysterious, she seemed quite down-to-earth and more than willing to chat with me at length about the battle, about the Fade, and about the legend of the darkspawn’s origin. 

She seemed ambivalent as to whether the story about the Tevinter magisters fouling the Maker’s City was meant to be taken literally, or as an allegory meaning that mankind’s collective sins are the source of all pain. It’s easy enough to imagine, oh unfortunate one, why the nice lady might not wish to believe that it was specifically a group of mages who doomed the world. 

The Tranquil gentleman I spoke to-- well, the less said about him the better, perhaps. Ghastly business, really. But I’ll admit that it does seem a better alternative than slaying any mage in danger of demonic possession. At least he’s able to experience life in some fashion, and as he says, be “productive.” I suppose productivity is what replaces happiness, when one is incapable of feeling.

I should briefly name the Grey Wardens who are to be present at my Joining, in case any of them turn out to be heroes of especial note. I would not lay odds on Daveth. He was apparently recruited to the Wardens because he got caught with Duncan’s coin purse. Ser Jory of Redcliffe seems honorable enough, but not deeply committed. He’s got a wife with child at home--a girl from my Highever, of all places!--so I suspect what he secretly wants is to fail his initiation and go back to her. And then there is Alistair, who has already been initiated as a true Warden but is unlikely to amount to much. He was meant to be a templar before Duncan recruited him, but to be honest, he doesn’t seem to have the temperament for that, either; he alternates between irreverent and tetchy. After having met the three of them I’ll admit I feel slightly less honored to be chosen. Perhaps the order is not as elite and competitive as I had believed. 

The highlight of the day, of course, was my meeting with the legendary Loghain Mac Tir. I projected enough confidence to the guard outside the tent that I was hardly questioned when I asked if I could see the teyrn. And when Loghain emerged, he recognized me! Not by name, but he knew right away that he had seen me before, and when I introduced myself I could see the spark of recognition in his eyes as the name fell into place. 

I attended a Landsmeet with Father exactly once, and somehow the man remembered. He’s every bit as clever as they say, though I hope for King Cailan’s sake that his daughter looks nothing like him. I think I initially intended to tell the teyrn the news about Highever, but something in his manner made me change my mind. He wasn’t hostile or dismissive, and in fact asked me several questions when he could easily have ended the conversation, but there is something about him that makes one deeply dread the idea of seeming weak in his presence. 

<strike>After my meeting with the teyrn, I visited the kennels and spoke</strike>

I was interrupted while writing; Duncan was gathering the recruits for our initiation. There is an air of secrecy about the whole thing, so I may be the first man who has dared to write of it. I hope this will be valuable to you, unfortunate reader. I am not certain if this is typical of most Warden initiations, but our first step was to venture into the Korcari wilds to slay our first darkspawn, collecting vials of their blood and in the process hunting down some lost Grey Warden treaties at the ruins of an old tower. I have just returned from that outing, and while Duncan prepares our Joining ritual I have time to record the event for posterity.

I can say without hesitation that that outing was the most nightmarish experience I’ve ever had. I do not use the word to mean “particularly trying,” as many hyperbolists are wont to do. I mean to say that it had an unreal quality, that the hairs on my neck stood on end the entire time, and nothing I saw or experienced made any sense.

First there were the wilds: a marshy forest sparsely littered with half-sunken, listing fragments of grand ruins, presumably Tevinter. I did not see a single work of man that had kept its perpendicular dignity; the earth had shrugged it all into surreal disarray, and even natural features seemed displaced and chaotic; exposed tree roots dangling over gullies, vines growing up or down or sideways or diagonally as the terrain permitted. 

Then there were the darkspawn themselves. I have fought all manner of wild beasts, and despite all the warnings, I was expecting something not unlike a great venomous spider with two legs instead of eight. This is what we imagine when we hear the word “monster” - we pour the ugliest thing we’ve experienced into a slightly different mold and assume we can imagine the horror. But the mind cannot conceive of true evil until it has stared into its face. It is useless to try, and words are flimsy conveyances. I shall try, and I shall fail, as all the soldiers I eavesdropped upon at camp failed to do before me. 

The darkspawn are driven and utterly hollow. They lack language; they lack even the simple moods or self-preservation of beasts, and yet they lay traps, set ambushes, draw back bowstrings and aim. Their flesh is pale; their mouths bristle with teeth and their eyes are dark holes; both mouth and eyes seep black ichor that smells of something worse than rot, worse than mold. Even a reader could glean from this simple description that they are unpleasant. But until one is in the darkspawn’s presence, experiencing the whole of them, it is difficult to explain the visceral horror they evoke. 

Perhaps the smell is part of it; scents have a way of reaching directly to the deepest and most unguarded parts of our consciousness. Or perhaps it is the way they move: familiar and yet just wrong enough in its mindless quickness to make the hairs rise on the neck. Deep guttural laughter sometimes emits from them with no apparent cause, a seemingly involuntary sound that resembles mirth only by chance. 

One can look at them and believe the tales: that they are the consequence of human sin. They mock our forms, go through the motions of using our weapons and tactics of war, but it seems a fragile veneer over something else, some singular wretchedness, some vast mindless loathing that pulses through all of them in unison like a diseased heartbeat.

Until you stand face to face with one, you simply will not understand. I know how maddening that is to read, how strangely smug it sounds, and I apologize, unfortunate reader. But truth is, perhaps more often than not, maddening.

At any rate, we fought them, we collected some of that reeking blood into vials, and we found the old ruined tower containing what should have been a magically sealed chest with Grey Warden documents inside. Instead we found the chest broken, and there we discovered that a wilder woman had been following and watching us for quite some time. 

She appeared seemingly from nowhere when we were examining the chest, and she, too, was like something from an unsettling dream. Pale, black-haired, with the golden eyes of a predator. Her bare feet were soundless; she was dressed in scraps of leather, string, and feathers. 

The other recruits went half mad in fear at the sight of her, which I did not fully understand, as she was perfectly cordial, if a bit coy. She addressed me as “handsome lad,” as though I were not clearly older than she (her clothing revealed enough of her form for me to confidently make that judgment). Jory and Daveth speculated on her nature aloud as though she weren’t even present; Alistair was so outright hostile to her that I had to step forward and take over the conversation before they provoked her into revealing whether she was, in fact, some sort of witch. 

All I had to do was treat her respectfully, and she was happy to lead us to her mother, who had apparently taken the documents from the chest in order to better protect them. Her mother was quite old and half mad, but the crone took a particular, peculiar interest in me and insisted that her daughter--Morrigan, she called her--show us the safest way back to the camp with the treaties. The moment we were within sight of civilization, Morrigan vanished as mysteriously as she’d appeared. I didn’t even have the chance to properly thank her.

Now there is nothing left to do but await the Joining, whatever that may be. Perhaps I shall be the first to write of it.

19 Drakonis

I shall not write of it. Suffice it to say, I am now a Grey Warden, and I now understand the need for secrecy.


	2. Fellowship

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aedan Cousland gathers companions for the task ahead of him.

2 Cloudreach

Location: Lothering  
Weather: Cool and fair  
Health: Well-recovered  
Temper: Determined  
Events: Battle of Ostagar and aftermath

I kept hearing her voice, in some state between waking and dreaming. I was asleep enough to be senseless of the world around me, unable to open my eyes and rise, but awake enough to wonder: why am I dreaming of her? The girl from the wilds. I hadn’t thought of her since we left the swamp, and now in my dreams I heard her, again and again. 

When we’d met, I had made note of her peculiarly cultured accent--her mother’s as well--but I had not fully appreciated the low, velvety slyness of her voice, its rich expressiveness. Now it washed over me like cool water, and I drank deeply. 

<<What are you dreaming of that makes you smile so? Perhaps it is best that you do not wake up -- when you do, that smile will not be long for the world.>> 

I was following her through the wilds. Darkspawn surrounded us, gnashing their blackened teeth, but wild Morrigan passed through them unharmed with a playfully swaying gait, leaving a safe wake in which I might follow. Her bare feet left softly glowing prints behind her in the mud.  
  
<<Come now, lazy lord. I’ve no wish for a pet. Stop playing dead, and open those eyes. They were green; I remember. You do no one any good, lying there, and your pretty face is fast losing its novelty.>> 

I am no mage; I normally remember dreams only in fragments. But there was something unnatural about this sleep, and perhaps that is why on this lone occasion I traveled the Fade as mages do, keeping full memory of it upon waking. 

Imagine my surprise when I came to full consciousness and found that Morrigan was not a dream at all. Her golden hawk’s eyes watched me shrewdly from near the door of her mother’s tiny hut in the wilds. She was patient with my questions, and explained as best she could that every Grey Warden but Alistair and myself had died at Ostagar. Teyrn Loghain had pulled his troops from the field and left the Wardens--and King Cailan--to die.  
  
Everywhere I go lately, a massacre unfolds around me. 

As soon as I had begun to get my bearings I dressed and left the hut to speak with her mother. She had the same raptor eyes as Morrigan, but her hair was wild and white, and she did not give the impression of a woman young enough to have a daughter barely grown. The wilder folk call her Flemeth, she told me, which gave me a start. A fearsome witch indeed, if the superstitious locals would grace her with that particular name. I know the legend of Flemeth well -- the Couslands possess Highever solely because Flemeth was said to have murdered its last lord, her husband Conobar, six centuries ago. 

I specifically remember that she said the wilders called her Flemeth, as though to suggest that it was not her name. A misdirection, I have now come to believe, as the extent of her power and wisdom (and madness) has become clearer to me. It was she who somehow rescued Alistair and myself from the top of the Tower of Ishal, a tower whose lower levels were swarming with darkspawn. It was she who healed us both, said her daughter Morrigan. And it was she who somehow knew to protect the Grey Warden treaties all these years, treaties which are now our only hope for gathering an army to replace the one lost at Ostagar. 

I suspect she may in fact be the Flemeth of legend, but I dare not speak this suspicion aloud in front of Alistair, who is more spooked by anything to do with magic than any rational man has the right to be. His hostility toward Morrigan is both excessive and troubling, given that Flemeth ordered her “daughter” (surely not) to accompany us on our new and ambitious quest. 

I feel quite differently, now, about writing in this journal. Thank you again, dear Aldous, Maker grant you peace, for instilling in me the ridiculous habit of ordering my thoughts in writing. If Alistair and I--the last two Fereldan Grey Wardens--do not succeed in our task, someone ought to know that an effort was made. And if we do succeed, surely someone will want to know how it all began. 

It began here in Lothering, with three people (and a dog) keeping their heads down and trying to go unnoticed as they gathered supplies and rumors. Morrigan hides because she is an apostate mage who would be captured and made Tranquil by the Circle most likely, and Alistair and I hide because for whatever reason, Teyrn Loghain either believes that the Grey Wardens betrayed King Cailan, or he is spreading that story to further his own aims. 

I go over and over this in my head, and I still cannot sort it out. I remember distinctly that Teyrn Loghain badgered His Majesty not to join the Wardens on the field, but that Cailan pulled rank and refused. If Loghain’s plan was to doom the Wardens all along, then the King’s death was not part of his plan, only--somehow!--an acceptable collateral casualty. Why was it so important to him that the battle of Ostagar go as it did? There must be a reason.  
  
Alistair and Morrigan have both leapt to the conclusion that he is scheming to seize the throne for no particular reason, just as Howe schemed to take Highever. But Teyrn Loghain is no Arl Howe, was not raised with a sense of entitlement. Every decision he has made in his long and distinguished career has been in service to Ferelden. It is no exaggeration to say that if not for Loghain Mac Tir, we would all be Orlesians. And yet he has never sought glory or benefit; only safety. He is a strategist and a careful thinker. What information are we missing? 

One factor worth considering: while I cannot say more, Teyrn Loghain is not entirely paranoid to mistrust Grey Wardens. The secrets we keep--though not secrets of which I personally am ashamed--would destroy our shining reputation if known by the masses. It is possible that a man as observant as the teyrn sensed an aura of shameful conspiracy about us and was forced to make his own educated guesses about what we might be hiding. He could never guess the truth on his own. No one could. 

At any rate, speculation gets me nowhere. Our obvious next step is to somehow survive long enough to get to Redcliffe Castle and speak with Arl Eamon. He was the King’s uncle, and is apparently an old mentor of Alistair’s. Between that and my own status as possibly the last surviving Cousland, Eamon will be inclined to listen to our account of what happened at the battle, and all of the Landsmeet will be inclined to listen to him. There is still hope. If we get out of Lothering alive, that is. One group of highwaymen already tried to cash in on the bounty Teyrn Loghain has placed on our heads. It did not go well for them. 

As much as Alistair would hate to admit it, Morrigan’s powers are tremendously useful in battle, and she seems to have them under ironclad control. It makes one wonder if the Chantry isn’t stirring up hysteria about magic for no reason. Morrigan has been free her entire life to study magic in her own way, and if she is possessed by a demon, it is certainly a polite one. Until she starts speaking to Alistair, at any rate, at which point her tongue becomes a double-edged razor. Maker, but those two despise each other. Every day I am more grateful for Bricks, who is thus far the best-mannered of our little foursome. 

All the same, however eccentric my new companions may be, I trust them, and given all I have been through in the past month I am deeply grateful not to be alone.

8 Cloudreach

Location: Lothering  
Weather: Cloudy, tepid  
Health: Good  
Temper: Anxious  
Events: Arrival of Sten and Leliana

We should not still be in Lothering. Everyone here knows that Alistair and I are Grey Wardens, and most of the villagers protect us, perhaps counting on us to save them from darkspawn. But “most” is not sufficient. Already yet another mob has ambushed us in hopes of handing our heads to Teyrn Loghain. Not highwaymen or soldiers this time, nothing but a pack of starved farmers and villagers desperate for the bounty. And still we had to slaughter every last one of them. Afterward I turned to Leliana, expecting that she would be a shaking wreck, but she was calmly retrieving arrows from their corpses. 

Leliana. I ought to explain her. I ought to write these things in order. 

At first I avoided entering the tavern or Chantry, not liking the idea of being trapped indoors with templars or drunken peasants, skirting the edges of town and trying to get what information I could from refugees. It was no use; they all recognized that there was something different about our well-armed and armored group. While we were skulking about the periphery we found a hulking beast of a man in a cage. He spoke with us, though he revealed little other than his name. “Sten of the Beresaad, vanguard of the Qunari people.” 

I have read of the Qunari, but never seen one. He did not look as they were described; I saw no sign of horns. In dim light he might have been mistaken for a monstrously large human. Morrigan was strangely taken with him, and wondered if we could see him released, or if not, at least do him the honor of a swift death. Though Sten was reluctant to speak, he eventually told us that the Revered Mother at the Chantry held the key to his cage. 

Under no circumstances was I going to walk into a Chantry with Morrigan tailing after me, and so I thought perhaps we might buy or badger our way into a room at the inn where she could be safe under Alistair’s watch while I investigated the situation further. The moment we walked into the tavern, however, we found our second ambush--this time Teyrn Loghain’s own men. They immediately surrounded us, but our odds still looked fairly good, given that Bricks and Morrigan were with us. 

That was when Leliana appeared. A sweet little slip of a redheaded girl with an Orlesian accent and a Chantry robe. In dulcet tones she appealed to Loghain’s men for peace; they responded much as you might expect. What I did not expect was that when they attacked, she would swipe a steak knife from a table and join the fray. 

Once we had killed all of the men but the leader, and had him on his knees in surrender, Leliana pleaded with me to spare him. My veins pulsed with battle-rage on top of garden-variety rage on top of grief bubbling back to the surface. I saw in him the men who slaughtered Oriana, my father and mother; I saw Loghain as Howe; it was all the same through the blood-red haze. But somehow through it all I saw Leliana’s eyes, at once tranquil and pleading, blue-gray as the sky outside. It was the most difficult act of self-mastery I have ever achieved, but I sheathed my blades and sent Teyrn Loghain’s dog back to his master with a message: <<The Wardens know what happened at Ostagar.>> 

Afterward Leliana insisted on joining us, claiming the Maker had sent her a vision revealing this as her destiny. Alistair, of course, was quick to judge her as mad, but I know enough to know that I know nothing of Chantry folk, or the Maker, or those who devote themselves to His service. And so I withheld judgment, especially given that she’d managed to fend off her portion of the ambush with nothing but a robe and a steak knife, and we have few enough willing allies. Earlier we’d stashed some perfectly serviceable weapons and leather armor from the highwaymen we killed on the way in, hoping to sell them later. Enough of the leather fit Leliana to put me better at ease about her safety. She also found a bow in our stash, which seemed to delight her. Something tells me she has not spent her entire life reading scriptures--wayward Orlesian nobility, perhaps, trained as Fereldan noblity are for battle? In any case it is not difficult to see that her help is needed. It would do Alistair good to look past surfaces once in a while. 

Once Leliana joined us and declared that we were doing the Maker’s work, it felt safer to enter the Chantry. I befriended a few templars, and Leliana made short work of convincing the Revered Mother to hand us the key to Sten’s cage. And so now we have a taciturn giant on our team as well. He could be a tremendous asset to us in battle if I could only figure out some way to outfit him. That is why we are still here. He hasn’t eaten in nearly a month--if he were human he’d be dead--and he is dressed only in soiled rags. Nothing the highwaymen wore comes close to fitting him, and he needs a proper sword. There are rumors of bandits lurking in the farmers’ fields; we must hunt them and see if they have anything we can use to equip our new “friend.” Otherwise it isn’t safe to take him from here; we may as well have offered him the mercy-killing in the cage that Morrigan suggested. 

There is further bad news. One of Arl Eamon’s knights was at the Chantry; apparently they are all out chasing some story about Andraste’s ashes, as the arl has taken gravely ill. He may even be dead. All the same, his family is more likely to welcome us than our other potential allies. The nearest possibility, geographically speaking, would be the Dalish in the Brecilian forest, but I’d be mad to wander into their territory without further support. The dwarves are farthest; I’d virtually have to walk through Redcliffe to get to them, and the Circle is just the other side of the lake from the arl’s castle. So heading to Redcliffe first still makes the most sense. But first we must either ensure that Sten can defend himself or abandon him to the mercy of the same villagers who imprisoned him. 

He is a murderer, you see. Slaughtered an entire family with his bare hands, says the Revered Mother, and he does not deny it. It is difficult to read a Qunari, but there is something about his story that gives me pause. He killed an entire family and then sat there, for days, until he was arrested? I feel he must be covering for something or someone else, someone he is willing to die for. Why else would he not have run? He cannot slaughter whomever he likes and hope for armies to back him up, as Howe can. He is alone here, far from home. Nothing I have read of the Qunari tells me they are likely to throw their lives away in foreign lands for no reason. There is more to his story, and until I know what it is, his life belongs to me. 

This is his punishment, but it is also my responsibility. That is the side of nobility that men like Howe forget. Those who belong to us--be they dogs, servants, vassals or stray Qunari--depend upon us to care for them as well as put them to use. It is only our care for them that gives us the right to use them. And so, by the Maker, I will find enough armor to cover this hulking beast, and put a sword in his hand, even if it means painting the fields red with bandit blood.

10 Cloudreach

Location: Camp off Imperial Highway  
Weather: Fair  
Health: Good  
Temper: Focused  
Events: Change of plan

On our way out of Lothering we happened to overhear a rumor that there has been a sudden rash of demon possessions at the Circle of Magi. My initial reaction to this rumor was, here is yet another ally we shall be unable to rely upon in our struggle, but after a brief chat with Morrigan I have reconsidered.   
  
Morrigan has an interesting take, perhaps due to not being raised in the Andrastian faith. She holds no particular terror of demons, instead viewing them as yet another enemy to be faced and overpowered or defeated. Given that she has apparently had more direct experience with spirits and demons than anyone else in our party, I am inclined to listen to her advice. If she is correct in viewing demons as fallible like any other enemy, this means that we may be in a position to help with a rather time-sensitive problem and secure allies in the process. Our journey to Redcliffe must be put off until we’ve at least seen the situation at the Circle for ourselves. 

The more I speak with Morrigan, the more grateful I am that her mother ordered her to accompany us. While she is shockingly (dare I say endearingly?) ignorant of the basics of human culture, trade, politics, and even socialization, she possesses a wealth of valuable knowledge if one is willing to look past her defensive and slightly self-absorbed manner. For example, by taking the time to ask questions of her background without judgment, I learned that she has the astonishing ability to take the form of animals. That is how she followed us through the wilds unseen, and how she “disappeared” afterward. 

The Circles of Magi profess to know all the answers about matters arcane, and yet they appear to be under attack by demons, while this half-clad free spirit throws lightning at my enemies, overwhelms their minds with paralyzing terror, and allegedly wanders the wilds turning into wolves and cats and Maker knows what else… yet she has no fear of demons whatsoever.  
  
I’ll admit that it is difficult to imagine a demon tempting or deceiving her; I have never met a person with such a strong will. At times she applies it to ridiculous ends, such as stubbornly refusing to back down in an argument on a subject of which she knows little, but her confidence is not entirely bravado. I know that there is fear somewhere at the heart of her--fear of what, I am uncertain. But when we speak of magic and demons, the brash excess of bravado gives way to the firm certainty that can come only from expertise. It is important to recognize the difference. 

I see the same sort of confidence in Sten, and I confess that it is one of the qualities I admire most in any being. Leliana has her own brand of certainty, but it is one born of blind faith, and while I do not think her as addled as Alistair does, I pity her. Her faith is a shield against something: some fear or pain she is unwilling to face head-on. I hope it will not become a problem for our little band, for we are otherwise getting along fairly well thus far. 

I rely not only on my own insight to judge my companions; Bricks is a surprisingly useful way to gather data about others. Leliana coos over him as though he were a pet. Alistair invades his territory while he is eating and then appeals for pity when bitten. Sten locks gazes with him, growls, and then cedes his worthiness as an ally. Most peculiar of all is the dog’s interaction with Morrigan; I have never seen him so abjectly submissive to anyone, particularly to someone who does nothing but heap him with verbal abuse. I wouldn’t let anyone talk to my hound that way if he didn’t so obviously adore it.   
  
Let that be a warning to me. I impulsively bought a golden necklace from a refugee at a shockingly low price, and only realized once it was in my hands that I had been imagining what it would look like draped around that slender throat. I have made a point to be generous with my new allies to earn their loyalty--I also gave Alistair an interesting statuette I noticed him eyeing at a merchant’s stand, and offered Leliana a bronze symbol of Andraste I’d found abandoned in Lothering. Both were delighted, and I was delighted in turn to see myself rise in their esteem. Gift-giving is something I have always enjoyed and had a knack for; there is nothing quite like the thrill of seeing someone look to you with wonder that you anticipated their heart’s secret desires (so easily read! Why does no one else mind the signs?). 

And yet, when I gave Morrigan the necklace--saw the undiluted greed in her eyes, the way her hands hesitated slightly just before taking it, the glance she darted upward, half suspicious, half wondering--an answering greed stirred in me. I stood there, expectantly, until she put the necklace on. I knew better than to order it; I knew she would resist. But it was my will, and she almost unknowingly obeyed, which made the blood run hot in my veins. Such a proud, stubborn creature, and I think if I set my mind to it I could buy her with pretty trinkets as easily as one might a common whore. The thought both repulses and fascinates me. But who is controlling whom? Perhaps that little glance, that demure show of gratitude, was her way of making me feel important--because what better way to bring a man to heel than to make him think himself your master? 

I shall have to be very careful with this one. I want her, that much is clear. But I shall only have her if I am certain that it is my choice, and that I have not been lured.

  


[_a smear of blood mars the top of the next page_]

The golem smashes the doors, the mouse slips through the cracks. What does it mean? It means something. Wynne fears failure. Be fire and fire will not burn you, be spirit and see the unseen. Leliana is helpless when the Chantry fails her. Remember. Spirit freezes fire, fire burns the golem, golems crush the spirit, and the mouse is helpless if seen. 

[_an incomprehensible sketch that looks almost like a strange floor plan, with arrows between disconnected rooms. It is unfinished._]

Morrigan was the last. I did not want to leave without her. The demon resembled her mother only when it slapped her face. She was not cowed--not fooled!--but she waited for me -- why? 

It’s fading so fast, writing doesn’t hold it. What golem? 

Damn it. I just wrote about a demon and Morrigan, I remember remembering it--an echo of an echo--but I no longer remember the demon. It’s slipping through my fingers like sand. 

<<We found each other in this place,>> Wynne said defiantly to someone, and I remember being surprised that my eyes burned with tears. 

And now I don’t. It’s gone. 

The others have rested and are urging me to proceed. Wynne and Morrigan remember their parts. But the bulk of it, the parts I alone saw... they are gone. Leliana does not remember her part; did not believe me when I told her that she treated me as a stranger, cowered in fear as I fought a demon alone. Now even I do not know if I told her the truth. 

I should not have stopped to write. I wanted to find some way to remember, but I have failed. Maker, don’t let me fail the Circle.


	3. Broken Circle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aedan and his new companions are thoroughly harrowed at Kinloch Hold, and a twisted romance begins to bloom.

23 Cloudreach

Location: Camp near Lake Calenhad  
Weather: Unseasonably cool  
Health: Drained and tired  
Temper: Shaken  
Events: Fall of Kinloch Hold, Wynne, journey to the Fade, a book and two kisses

If I had known the horrors that awaited me at the Circle Tower I would not have gone. Maker’s breath - I have never been so frightened: I who fled my own home not quite two months ago, stumbling over corpses. I know now why magic is feared.

When Sten, Leliana and I arrived at Kinloch Hold (given the way Alistair goes half mad at the very thought of magic and demons, I elected to leave him in camp with Bricks) we were told by templar Knight-Commander Graegoir that the doors to the main tower were sealed. Demons and abominations had taken over the Circle, and Graegoir had called for the Right of Annulment. That meant that templar reinforcements were on their way, and once they arrived, they would kill everything that still moved in the tower.

The first thing I thought of was the mages who had fought at Ostagar. I was told that unlike the Grey Wardens, many of the mages had survived and returned to the Circle. That Tranquil fellow who so unnerved me, the white-haired woman with her reasonable voice, they had risked their lives to help save Ferelden from darkspawn and were now locked in the tower to die.

In what would be my last act of courage for - how long? Hours? Days? - I insisted that they lock me in with them. I said that we would protect any innocents who still lived and cleanse the place of demons. Graegoir said he would let no one out of the tower, including me, without the word of the First Enchanter - a man named Irving who had been locked in long ago. I do not know whether to thank the Maker or curse my naivete for whatever mad and misguided confidence led me to believe I could survive in there long enough to find him.

The templars, as promised, locked the door behind us as soon as we crossed the threshold.

The first hallway we traversed, the apprentices’ quarters, gave a grim (but in retrospect misleadingly quiet) preview of what we would face. Fresh bodies of both templars and mages lay sprawled where they’d fallen in the hall and in the sleeping quarters, all looking to have been felled by primal elemental magic, but there was no sign of demonic activity. Nothing alive at all in fact, only scattered apprentice journals to give us hints as to what had happened. There were vague mentions in the most recent entries of a Senior Enchanter named Uldred who had been rallying apprentices to help him make sweeping changes in the Circle.

Past the doorway at the far end of the hall, I was granted my last stroke of good luck: I found the old woman from Ostagar, alive. She looked weary, but unharmed, and was protecting children with an arcane barrier of her own creation that shut off access to the rest of the tower. 

“It’s you!” she exclaimed by way of greeting. “No. Come no further. Grey Warden or no, I will strike you down where you stand.” Between Teyrn Loghain and an elderly mage both recognizing me on sight after a single meeting, I am beginning to believe I have a memorable face. 

Though time was of the essence, once I had reassured her that I was not here to enact the Right of Annulment, we allowed for proper introductions. Her name is Wynne, and she is a skilled healer and a Senior Enchanter of the Ferelden Circle of Magi. She told me that one of her fellow Ostagar veterans had tried to take over the Circle upon their return. This power-mad veteran was, of course, Senior Enchanter Uldred from the apprentices’ journals. 

“I’m sure Uldred has some good qualities,” Wynne said with dry diplomacy. “He probably has a very good reason for not displaying them.”

Wynne didn’t know what had become of Uldred in the chaos, but she had never liked the man, and she was certain that the current state of the tower was his fault. He had gone into a meeting with First Enchanter Irving at the apex of the tower, and once the doors to the meeting room had closed something had clearly gone horribly wrong. Screams had been heard from that part of the tower, but no one had survived attempts to investigate.

When I agreed to help Wynne try and save what uncorrupted mages remained, Morrigan pulled me aside. In a low and distractingly (deliberately?) intimate murmur, she opined that Circle mages were sheep who no longer even knew how to graze without their shepherds nearby. She was of the mind that there was no way any of them could have survived such an ordeal with their minds and souls intact. She was actually in favor of letting the templars annul the entire circle! But I had already made up my mind to at least try to help them, and so I silenced her further objections before Wynne could overhear.

My idea was that with a highly trained healer protecting us, we could safely unseal and enter the upper levels of the tower and determine for ourselves who was corrupt and who was innocent. At this point Sten (wisely, in retrospect) offered to stay behind and help protect the children in Wynne’s place. In truth I was relieved; while he is not as vocally fearful of magic as Alistair, he has made occasional dry comments that led me to believe he might not make the most sympathetic of mage-rescuers. I also thought that thanks to Wynne’s assistance I would suffice as sufficient shield for Leliana and Morrigan.

Maker forgive me for my arrogance. The moment Wynne dissolved the barrier, we heard screams in the distance. We smelled fresh blood and human excrement and a sulfurous stink I now know to be the reek of demons. Even so, I stubbornly convinced myself that I, who had awakened to a massacre at Highever and fought through a darkspawn horde at Ostagar, was the perfect man to keep a level head and solve the problem.

I was wrong.

I will not catalogue the dozens upon dozens of dead, neither those dismembered on the blood-slick floors nor the shambling possessed corpses that attacked us. Nor will I tally the hunched, twisted abominations still wearing their old mage robes, something inside the formerly human skin stretching and warping it all out of proportion. 

We did, at least, find some answers. One of the corrupted mages, near death, explained as best she could what had happened, and to my profound distress I learned that Teyrn Loghain’s hand was behind this, if indirectly. He had spoken with Uldred and said that if Uldred could take charge of the Ferelden Circle and put its support behind Loghain for the Fereldan throne, he would reward the Circle with additional freedoms and reduced templar oversight.

Reader, this girl was desperate. I had never understood before how severely some Circle mages chafed against the restraints placed upon them, but I saw in her eyes that she preferred death to continuing to live - as she saw it - in a cage. Apparently Uldred harbored the same desperation. Sometimes, or so he had been preaching to the apprentices, extreme measures were necessary to effect change. As this young woman put it, “Andraste waged war upon the Tevinter Imperium; she didn’t write them a strongly worded letter.”

But Uldred had gone too far, by anyone’s standards. He resorted to blood magic to give him the power he sought - the power to control men’s minds. Blood magic brings demons, and demons are all too good at breaking their bindings. It was now the demons, and not Uldred, who were in charge of this tower. I realized - as I put this girl to the sword like merciful Hessarian at Andraste’s pyre - that because mind-magic was at work, there was no way of telling good from evil by sight. The demons didn’t even need to possess people and turn them into visible abominations in order to control them. They’d had time to magically control the minds of anyone and everyone in the tower.

Even if I’d wanted to stubbornly try for peace, I would have failed. Everyone - every thing we saw - attacked us. We were beset by shades, fiery rage demons, and even a handful of crazed templars. The poor men had been ensorcelled by desire demons: sickening creatures that made my bile and manhood rise simultaneously, the most wretched feeling imaginable. Above all, though, my pride and my sense of self were most scarred by the sloth demon. 

It overpowered us all, even Morrigan. She explains that while our bodies fell into helpless slumber on the tower floor, our spirits were separated and tormented in the Fade. Somehow, she says, my spirit was rebellious enough that I broke free of the illusion the sloth demon had created and fought my way through the sloth demon’s realm to find each of my companions. One by one, she says, I dissolved my companions’ private dream worlds and brought us all together to defeat our would-be master and return to consciousness. I believe her account - why would she make up a story in which I rescued her? - but to me, everything after listening to that demon’s warped, soothing voice is a forgotten dream.

I should give my hand a brief rest, here. Afterward I shall go back to before the sloth demon, because so much happened before we even got there, unfortunate reader. I apologize for the disorder of my mind. If you do not yet understand, you will by the time I reach the end of the tale.

\--

The first thing I should mention is an encounter that is necessary to relate so that after reading Morrigan’s version of events in the Fade you do not begin to think me some sort of superlative hero.

My part in this encounter was to shatter a vial. I have no idea what possessed me to pick it up, nestled as it was in a hollow behind a fallen statue of Andraste. I should have had Morrigan or Wynne at least examine it before I touched it, but it appeared to be sealed, and I was so desperate for any advantage that I reached for it unthinkingly. It shattered at my touch, and a strange dark vapor escaped into the air.  
  
Suddenly there was something else in the room with us.

A revenant, Wynne named it. It was a towering, silent, armored thing with a sword as long as a man is high. Somehow even the cavernous room we found it in seemed too small to hold its power. Its shadowed countenance filled me with naked, childlike terror. But before my trembling arms could even lift their weapons, Morrigan cast a hex at it, and this enraged it so irrevocably that the rest of the battle was pure madness.

That great, cold, heavy silent figure pursued Morrigan with a relentlessness unlike anything I have witnessed. Round and round the vast room she darted, weaving between columns and toppled podiums, benches and fallen corpses, light-footed as a hare, and it crashed after her, splintering wood and crumbling stonework. I could scarcely keep up with it; I stabbed at its armored back with both my swords in a futile attempt to divert its attention.

Leliana found a position in the corner and loosed burning arrows, her expression blank and grim. Wynne did her best to heal Morrigan every time the creature’s terrible sword found her. At times - and this was perhaps most horrifying of all - the women found themselves stumbling helplessly toward the creature when they meant to flee; it was a vortex one was forever in danger of tumbling into headfirst. We scarcely seemed to be weakening it for all our blows. Only when Morrigan managed to get far away enough to dare turning and aiming a hex at it did we see the thing make any sign of suffering. Perhaps that was why it pursued her so.

But Morrigan is only human - so far as I know - and in time her strength began to flag; her feet slowed just enough for it to catch her and cut her down with a single blow so forceful that it spun her round as she fell. I heard my own raw cry of rage. Before I could hurl myself at the beast, undoubtedly impaling myself on that terrible blade, Wynne had already surrounded Morrigan with a blinding surge of the Maker’s own light, returning her to us. I am not sure which is more remarkable: the revealed extent of Wynne’s healing power or the fact that no sooner had Morrigan regained her feet han she hurled another vicious spell at the creature and began the dance all over again.

I’ve no idea how much longer the battle lasted; we were exhausted, bleeding, dazed. Leliana crumpled to the ground and Wynne was too spent to help her. We blindly flailed whatever we could at the creature as it pursued the undaunted witch to every corner of the room. Then somehow, miraculously, like water against a rock we wore it down, and it fell. Its armor clattered to the stone floor, full of dust and lifeless bones. 

Wynne dashed to Leliana’s side; the young woman still lived, thank the Maker. I had not even seen the creature strike her; my eyes had been locked the entire time on Morrigan in a transport of urgent fear. Now I rushed to Morrigan, half expecting her to collapse against me, but she held me off with a hand, even though I could see the trembling in her every limb, and her face was so drained of blood I could nearly see her skull beneath it.  
  
“That is quite close enough,” she said. “If you wish to play the rescuing knight, I believe there is a swooning damsel at the other side of the room.”

“Never do that again,” I said to her, the battle-rage still humming through my nerves.  
  
“Do what? Save you from a horror you unleashed? Very well, next time I shall let it devour you.”

“I thought it had killed you.”  
  
“We are all standing here now, are we not? What is the point of endlessly reliving the battle?”

It was then that I saw how close she was to tears, and I turned away, half out of respect for her privacy and half because the sight unsettled me.

At the time I was puzzled at the way such a selfish creature had seemed to sacrifice herself for us, to pull the monster’s attention toward her so fearlessly. Now, however, I believe I understand. It wasn’t that Morrigan meant to protect us; she in fact had disregarded our presence entirely. The moment that creature appeared, she simply proceeded as though the rest of us were not in the room. She did not count on us to save her.

What shook her so terribly, I believe, was not just that she failed, and fell, but that Wynne - the “sheep” with whom she had thus far not even deigned to speak directly - had saved her.

I think she regretted the way she spoke to me afterward, to judge by her behavior when we found First Enchanter Irving’s office immediately thereafter.

Wynne had half expected to find him there, but the room was abandoned. Irving’s journal remained on his desk, however. In it, I saw that for years he had been colluding with Uldred to deliberately tempt apprentices toward blood magic, so that he could “reveal deviant tendencies early” and, I assume, perform the Rite of Tranquility on those who fell for his trap. This was the man whose word I was supposed to trust that all was well? If he could deceive his own apprentices in such an appalling manner, even before he was potentially exposed to mind-controlling magic, how was I to trust his word now?

In continuing to search his possessions for further clues, I found something utterly remarkable: a coal-black grimoire which Morrigan immediately recognized as Flemeth’s from years past. She admitted that the reason she had accompanied me to the tower in the first place was that she knew the grimoire had fallen into the possession of the Ferelden Circle, and with the tower in disarray she had hoped to find and study it herself. I presented it to her without hesitation, and here, dear reader, she did something most peculiar.

First glancing to make certain Leliana and Wynne were not watching, she darted in to kiss me full on the mouth. It was a swift thing amidst all the horror, like the streak of a falling star across the night sky. And then she busied herself tucking the book away in her pack, as though nothing had happened.

But, as strange as it sounds, it was this one reckless, human moment, this one stubborn chaotic spark of life amid all the death and horror, that gave me the strength I needed to continue. And I would need strength, for the sloth demon and the Fade were to follow, and then… the Harrowing chamber.

This chamber, all too well named, lies at the very apex of the tower, and so we knew even before we approached that for better or worse it was the end of our journey. Just outside its entrance we found a young golden-haired templar named Cullen, around Morrigan’s age. He had been trapped in some manner of arcane prison and tortured for - I know not how long. He was out of his mind, but the one thing he said that cut through me like a sword was that it would only take one escaped blood mage to poison the mind of a king or a Grand Cleric. He wanted me to slay every mage in the nearby Harrowing chamber. Never one to take orders when I can avoid it, especially from men my junior, I told him that first I had to see what was happening for myself.

The chamber, ironically, is the site of testing for each new arrival at the Circle to see if they are strong enough to resist demonic possession. Inside was Uldred, already possessed by a demon himself, systematically bending the wills of each of the remaining mages until they, too, agreed to play host to a demon. I tried to slay him quickly enough to save the other mages, but they all turned into wretched abominations before Uldred fell, including the former First Enchanter. I cannot help but think that Irving brought this on himself, with his treachery and cruelty to those in his charge.

The young templar Cullen came in once the room had quieted. He was somewhat calmer, grateful that we had been able to stop Uldred and that there was no further risk of corruption. Weak as he still was, he led us back to the lower floor; there I found Sten, to my utter bafflement, sitting and telling a story to two children - one sitting on his knee! He immediately displaced the child and rose, looking as though I’d caught him robbing a merchant, and followed me out without another word.

Cullen went to the main doors and, from the locked side, assured Graegoir that it was safe to let us out. As it turned out, with the exception of Wynne as the only survivor, _we_ had effectively exercised the Right of Annulment ourselves. With no other mages left to aid us against the darkspawn, we instead used our Circle treaty to call upon the templars, and Graegoir agreed. Having fought a few ensorcelled templars on the upper levels, I feel confident that they will be formidable allies in the fight. 

To my surprise, Wynne refused Graegoir’s offer of the First Enchanter position at the Circle and asked if she could accompany us, instead, to fight the darkspawn. After all she went through with us, I have to say that I was heartened by the idea of having her skills on our side. Graegoir gave her permission, and so I led the three women back to camp.

I waited until I was certain Morrigan had recovered her sense of smug self-possession, and then I went to her tent to speak with her about Flemeth’s grimoire. She has not yet been able to dispel the wards on the tome, but she believes it is only a matter of time. I let her speak for a time, let her choose topics of conversation, agreed with her when she seemed to require it, challenged her when I thought it would amuse her. I waited until her words had run dry, and then I stepped close.

She backed away instinctively, and asked my intent. “Do you object?” I asked her. I could see her thinking this over, setting aside her flight instinct, engaging higher thought. I could almost see her calculations as she pondered what the benefits might be of allowing intimacy from the man who has - somehow, by default - become the leader of a force against the Blight. I saw the exact moment the scales balanced in my favor. I saw her make the decision to close the distance, to reach for me, the way one might decide to invest in a business enterprise.

But when I took her in my arms and decisively kissed her, the catch of her breath was not calculated, nor the trembling of her hand, nor the pounding of her heart. 

She wears so little in the way of clothing that it was difficult to avoid touching bare skin; she twitched but did not pull away. There were unattended tangles in her hair. I tried to say with touch what she would have scornfully rejected if I’d said in words. <<You are remarkable. I value you. I will take care of you.>> 

When I drew away and said good night, she pulled me back, kissed me again hungrily, scratched her nails along my poorly-shaven jaw. Then she turned her back, went into her tent without a word. A more impatient man might have taken it as an invitation. If it was, I declined it, returning to the center of camp.

There will be time for that later, assuming we survive that long. I left it at a kiss, left her alone to think of me in her tent, and we have not spoken of it since.


	4. Dark Revelations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aedan finds out lots of new information. None of it good.

26 Cloudreach

Location: Hinterlands camp  
Weather: Rainy  
Health: Good  
Temper: Even  
Events: The giant speaks.

Two mornings ago, as we began packing up to travel to Redcliffe on the other side of Lake Calenhad, Sten approached me. “You are not as callow as I thought,” he said in lieu of greeting.

I had allowed everyone a few days’ rest at our lakeside camp to recover, resupply, and to acquaint themselves with Senior Enchanter Wynne, since she will now be traveling with us. It seems Sten had been observing my interactions with the others, or perhaps he had simply had enough time to process our previous conversation, which took place just after the ordeal at Kinloch Hold.

I’d approached him because seeing him with the children there had puzzled me. Here was a man (is that the right term?) who had apparently killed an entire family with his bare hands, but who had also treated strange human children with enough kindness to earn their trust despite his size, his coarse white braids and grayish pallor, his strange red-rimmed violet eyes. I’d had no luck thus far getting him to speak of the crimes that led to his imprisonment in Lothering, and so I tried another line of questioning this time, asking him why he had come to Ferelden in the first place.

He told me that he came here to answer a question. His “arishok” had asked, “What is the Blight?” I asked him to define “arishok,” and Sten answered that the arishok commands the “antaam,” the “body of the qunari.” Context suggests that the antaam are the qunari armed forces, that Sten is a soldier by profession. I asked when he planned to report back to his arishok. He replied that he would not - that he could never go home. 

Sten is not an easy man to read, but the pain in that last statement was unmistakable. I had no idea how to comfort him, and so I simply told him that he could stay with us.

“Thank you,” he said. Words I had never heard from him, in a tone I had never heard either. For the time being, that was all.

Senior Enchanter Wynne was understandably exhausted after the ordeal at the Circle, and to be honest, the rest period I ordered was largely on her account. Leliana, on the other hand, surprised me by bouncing back almost immediately; by the day after the massacre she was singing to herself and telling stories to the others. I asked her about her archery skills, and she explained that before becoming affirmed as a lay sister in the Chantry here, she had been a traveling minstrel in Orlais. 

It stands to reason that one who spends a lot of time on the road must learn some means of defending oneself, but there was something odd in her answer. She was so blatantly, almost playfully evasive that I don’t believe she was even trying to conceal that there was more to the story. I think it was her way of telling me that she knows I am prying, but that she isn’t in the mood for serious disclosures at present. Very well. She’s earned her place, regardless.

Alistair is the one I’m honestly not certain how to integrate into the group, despite his being the only other Grey Warden. He seems so adrift and rudderless without the structure of the Wardens, without Duncan to lead him. He doesn’t want to lead, but he outranks me in the Wardens and so I suppose he can’t really seem to look to me as a leader either. He’s friendly enough, in his bumbling way, but we haven’t exactly become close. We’ve talked mostly of the Grey Wardens – what they were like as a group, if the order might ever be rebuilt in Ferelden. I have tried to connect with him beyond that to no avail.

But then Sten, despite the wary manner in which I’ve tended to deal with him, put me off-balance two mornings ago with this strange attempt at paying me a compliment. He went on to say he found me puzzling, and I said I returned the feeling. That surprised him further. He argued that he was quite simple, and I told him I disagreed. Then I demanded once again to know why he had ended up in that cage in Lothering. This time, he told me.

He came here with seven others of what he calls the “Beresaad,” his brothers in arms. They were all cut down by a horde of darkspawn not far from the Circle Tower. I compared this aloud to my experience at Ostagar, which elicited from him a moment’s thoughtful silence. Like me, he somehow survived, but he awoke to worse luck: alone among strangers and without his sword. He asked his rescuers what had become of the weapon, and when they claimed they had found him unarmed, he panicked and slew the entire family with his bare hands.

Explanation was necessary, here. Apparently for a soldier of the qunari, one’s sword is one’s soul. Their weapons are not interchangeable; if he tried to return without his he would be slain on sight as a soulless deserter. I suppose I could have tried to argue with such a barbaric superstition, but why debate abstract matters when there may be a practical solution? He had lost the sword a day’s walk from where we were currently camped, and so despite his assertions that it would be futile, I insisted he and I take a trip out there while the others finished packing up the camp.

He was right in assuming the sword would no longer be there, but we did find a witness to the looting of the place. We were told a man named Faryn had picked the place clean and then said he was heading to Orzammar. We are bound there ourselves eventually, so I told Sten I would inquire further once we reached the dwarven city. He said nothing. His face was like stone.

When we returned to camp, he turned to me and demanded to know how I expected to stop the Blight. I was beginning to half expect strange non sequiturs from him, and so I simply answered him: the Blight ends when we slay the archdemon. He told me he had heard stories of the Grey Wardens’ skill and strategy, but so far he was not impressed. Reaching the end of my patience, I told him I wasn’t here to impress him. 

“It only remains,” he replied, “to see what you are here for.”

I confess that my long-term strategy is hazy at best. For now, I continue gathering allies. Arl Eamon is next, if his health permits. If not, Maker help us, for rumors abound that some of the banns are already mustering against Loghain’s claim as regent. Unless someone with Arl Eamon’s clout can decisively end this madness, Ferelden, already threatened by a Blight, may be on its way to civil war as well.

29 Cloudreach

Location: Eastern Shore of Lake Calenhad  
Weather: Warm  
Health: Exhausted  
Temper: Livid  
Events: My reputation precedes me.

Maker’s hairy balls! As if darkspawn and abominations and a brewing civil war weren’t enough! 

A peasant woman accosted us on a narrow, crag-choked section of the road to Redcliffe. She seemed in a panic, saying her wagon had been attacked, and then she ran the way she’d come. I glanced behind us down the road. On a hunch I’d split us into two groups, a Warden in each. Alistair, Morrigan, and Bricks were still too far behind us to be seen, so my hope was that we would not need their assistance.

We followed the distressed woman, and as soon as we rounded the corner into an open area I saw him: a blond elf with elegant features and a tattoo of two serpentine vertical lines just before the left ear. Clearly not a servant, for he wore leather armor and had wicked curved blades at his hips. Even before he gave the signal, I knew.

It was too late. A huge tree crashed into the path behind us, cutting off our escape and our potential reinforcements. More men and women appeared from hiding spots on the high ground surrounding the wagon. Arrows fell on us like rain, and the ground was littered with traps, limiting our ability to run. Thank the Maker for Wynne’s healing, and for Leliana, who spotted and disabled the traps while Sten and I kept the attackers occupied. Without those two women we’d have been dead eight times over. We ended up slaughtering nearly twenty highly trained assailants, the “terrified peasant” first (she turned out to be an apostate mage).

I was careful only to disable, not kill, the tattooed elf who gave the signal. This was clearly a formal assassination attempt, and if anyone would have answers about its origin, it would be he. Still half mad with battle rage, I was prepared to resort to torture, but to my surprise the elf made that unnecessary.

Zevran Arainai is his name, and he hails from Antiva - one of the Crows. Leliana explained the assassin guild to me in great detail, and while I suppose any minstrel worth her salt would know such dramatic tales, something the way she spoke of the Crows raised my suspicions once again about her own history. At any rate, the Crows are apparently the best and priciest assassins in Thedas, and they are generally only called in when the job has no room for failure. 

How embarrassing this turn of events must be for them.

Zevran was oddly lighthearted about the whole affair; he wasted no time in telling us, quite colorfully and with genuinely dazzling comic timing, that Teyrn Loghain had contracted him in Denerim to kill the surviving Grey Wardens.

Do you see now, unfortunate reader, that my instinct to keep myself separated from Alistair was justified? If the Crows had succeeded, there would still at least be one Grey Warden left in Ferelden. This also removes all ambiguity about Loghain’s intent at Ostagar--he meant for all the Wardens to die. But why? 

Something about this doesn’t add up, but at the moment I truly don’t give a damn. If someone put Teyrn Loghain in front of me just now I believe I’d pulverize him into a fine crimson mist before bothering with something so tedious as questions.

I’d have settled for finding out who told these assassins that we were headed to Redcliffe and gave them time to find the perfect ambush spot and lay their preparations. This is the one thing Zevran refused to tell me. He said he did not trust me to be as merciful with his informant as I had been with him. He claimed it was someone blameless, but I found this impossible to contemplate. 

Leliana said that this is where the Crows excel most--inducing small and unsuspecting people to betray a target’s plans, habits, or current location without even knowing they are doing so. Her reassurances made me suspect her for a mad moment. I know she hasn’t told me the whole truth about herself, and her appearance immediately after we’d been identified as Grey Wardens in Lothering was most fortuitous. She seemed all too eager to deflect me from questioning the nature of Zevran’s source… but this is madness. I can’t live every moment waiting for my back to be impaled by a friend’s knife.

In truth, one of the very assassins I just slaughtered was likely hiding at the Spoiled Princess tavern by the Calenhad docks, evaluating my strengths and reporting overheard scraps about our plans. I wasn’t cautious enough about what I said to my companions and when. I didn’t pay enough attention to commoner gossip to note any new arrivals in the area. A mistake I shall not repeat.

Zevran Arainai thought I should be flattered that he considered a twenty-man ambush necessary, but I can feel nothing, not even weariness, around my white-hot rage. Normally it takes no more than hour after a battle for my vision to clear, but even now it is as though the battle rages still, and I am helpless in its thrall.

This is why I know that now is not the time to change course or decide our next move. I must continue to Redcliffe, carry out the plan I made before I lost all reason. But we are delayed. We all required a night’s sleep after that battle--in shifts no less, because someone must be awake at all times to keep an eye on Zevran.

Yes, we brought him with us. No, that is not as insane as it sounds. Zevran’s first attempt to kill me failed; even if he succeeded at a later date, he has so marred the Crows’ sterling reputation that his life is forfeit regardless. He knows he is safer in our company, and we know that we need as many skilled allies as we can find. He and I also know that the Crows will be hunting both of us, and only Zevran has the experience to adequately spot signs of their presence or interference. For the time being, we need one another.

I am not foolish enough, however, to think that he is trustworthy. I do believe he could be made loyal, however, now that I know a bit of his background (he continues to be oddly forthcoming, assuming anything he says is true). The Crows bought him as a child, and while he enjoys his work, he was never given a choice. If Zevran is handled carefully and treated with respect, I believe the sense of self-preservation that causes him to remain with us could be converted into true loyalty. I have my eye on him; and I would be a fool not to realize that he also has his eye on me. He is nothing if not a survivor, and he does not yet know precisely what manner of man he has fallen in with. I aim to show him, and to give him something new to serve.

  
  
  


2 Bloomingtide

Location: Redcliffe Village  
Weather: Fair  
Health: Good  
Temper: Irritable  
Events: Alistair’s identity revealed, Redcliffe under attack

I suppose I should have predicted that Arl Eamon’s illness would be the least of Redcliffe’s problems. As soon as we arrived within sight of the town a runner intercepted us and brought us to Bann Teagan of Rainesfere, Arl Eamon’s brother, in the local Chantry. Bann Teagan informed us that Redcliffe Castle, the arl’s home, has fallen silent, and that each night, a growing army of animated corpses emerges from behind its gates to attack the village. 

If my hopes for aid had begun to sink when I heard that Arl Eamon was ill, they have now plummeted. It seems unlikely that anyone in the castle is alive. Similar odds hadn’t stopped me from entering Kinloch Hold, however, and if I hadn’t done that, Wynne and that young templar Cullen and a handful of children would be dead as well. If we save even one life in Redcliffe, it will be better than doing nothing.

If we can manage to repel the next nocturnal assault, I shall take a few of my companions in the morning and investigate the castle myself. For now, though, our energies must be directed toward protecting the village. With the help of Redcliffe’s mayor in directing me to potential resources, I’ve found lamp oil so that we might burn the creatures when they arrive, threatened a stubborn dwarven mercenary named Gwyn and his companions into lending their skills to the fight, convinced a Chantry mother to distribute trinkets to Eamon’s knights so they can feel themselves blessed by the Maker, and persuaded a miserable drunken smith to make necessary repairs to damaged armor and weapons before nightfall.

Truth be told, taking charge of the situation felt natural. I would not have thought, after that disaster at Kinloch Hold, that I would ever again feel a sense of confidence, but somehow as I comforted frightened children and bullied amoral mercenaries I once again felt myself \- not a junior Grey Warden, not a teyrn’s spare son - but simply Aedan, as though this peculiar and unprecedented role I have come to play in fighting the Blight waited all along for me to fill it.

As it happens, there may be more than ill luck at work in this turn of events. My assassin-turned-ally Zevran, who accompanied me to the local tavern, spotted with his watchful eyes a suspicious-looking elf sitting alone - clearly not a local. I was able to browbeat the stranger into handing over proof of why he was loitering here: a letter of instruction, regrettably unsigned.

<<Berwick,

We need your eyes and ears in Redcliffe. Stay in the village, keep your head down, and watch the castle. Report any changes, and you'll be well paid.>>

This all happened before Arl Eamon became ill. And the man who was to pay Berwick? According to him, it was someone in the employ of Arl Rendon Howe.

“Arl Howe is Teyrn Loghain’s right hand,” Berwick insisted. “So I’m not doing anything wrong!”

Teyrn Loghain’s right hand. Did his left hand know what his right hand did in Highever? The answer to that question will determine whether Loghain dies by my hand.

Howe’s elven lackey is now trapped here like everyone else. The last word he was able to send was a report of the arl’s illness; now he is afraid that if he leaves, he’ll be slain by the monsters when night falls. I demanded that he fight alongside the militia tonight, if he didn’t want to die by my blades there and then. Under the circumstances, he found his courage. 

Meanwhile, Alistair is an even more evasive bastard than I realized, and I speak literally. Apparently, the presence of Bann Teagan painted my fellow Grey Warden into a corner, and he was forced to reveal to me (before Teagan did) that he is quite conceivably the heir to the Fereldan throne. Maker’s breath, it’s like something from a copper novel. 

I don’t disbelieve him; his resemblance to the late King Cailan (his half-brother!) is undeniable now that I look at him, and Maric would not have been the first king to dally with a servant girl. It does explain a great deal about the way Alistair has been protected his entire life. He certainly isn’t a talented enough warrior or compelling enough personality to be worth all the trouble that Chantry, Grey Wardens, Arl Eamon and others have gone to on his behalf. Suddenly his puzzling history begins to make something resembling sense.

I haven’t time right now to thoroughly work out what this means about the line of succession, but I do think it best to sideline him as much as possible in the fighting from here on out. If nothing else, he may be an important point of negotiation at some later date. Morrigan was baffled when she heard; she wanted to know why Alistair hadn’t lorded his royal blood over us from the very beginning. It is what she would have done, after all.

While Morrigan remains an incredibly useful battle companion and advisor, I’m a bit irked at her, if we are being honest, and not only because she disapproves of my efforts to save Redcliffe village. She has begun to anger me on a more personal level. I did not expect her to declare undying love for me after a single kiss, but the brazen way in which she has today been flirting with Sten of all people - within my earshot! - is an assault on my pride that I do not suffer gracefully.

Speaking of assaults, I am losing the light even as I write, which means the undead will soon be upon us. I would ask that the Maker have mercy on our souls, but the longer I live in this world the more I come to believe what the Chantry tells us: that the Maker abandoned us long ago, and we are on our own.

  
  


3 Bloomingtide

Location: Redcliffe Village  
Weather: Fair  
Health: Weary  
Temper: Foul  
Events: Attack on Redcliffe Village, Visit from Arlessa

Redcliffe Village is a bloody mess, both literally and figuratively. We survived the night, but half the militia died, and the mayor. I thought there would be no end to the undead, but in the end we destroyed them all, and many of us lived to tell the tale. 

I ended up on reasonably good terms with Dwyn, the dwarven mercenary I bullied into helping. He performed admirably in the fight, and afterward, as I helped him put his house back in order late into the night (including the door I’d kicked in), he gave me advice on dealing with Orzammar merchants. I asked if he’d ever dealt with anyone named Faryn there, and he hadn’t, but Sten overheard my asking. Irritably Sten told me his sword would be long sold by now and to let the matter drop, but he has been hovering in my periphery like some bizarre cross between a bodyguard and a motherless duckling ever since.

The elf Berwick, too, was a capable archer, as it turned out. I let him live. Most of the knights survived; it was the militia, the regular folk who took up arms to defend their homes, who were cut down like wheat. Even one more attack will finish this village. We must find the source of the evil, and we must do it today.

Whatever is going on inside the castle, Arlessa Isolde knows more than she is telling. She emerged in the morning at the mill just long enough to tell us that something evil has killed everyone in the castle but her family. She, the arl, and their son Connor are being kept alive for unknown reasons. She worries that Connor is going mad from all the death he has witnessed, and she demanded that Bann Teagan return to the castle with her alone to help him. 

It is a trap; it must be. Even Teagan agreed with me, but he would not be dissuaded. He thought he could serve as a distraction for whatever this “evil” is the arlessa mentioned - some sort of demon, surely - while we sneak into the castle through a passage in the mill.

I need to think carefully about who if anyone to bring with me through the passage. This seems even more of a suicide mission than the Circle, as none among us has the first idea what to expect or how the castle is laid out. Alistair, clearly, cannot be risked. And if I fall here, he will need Morrigan, whether he admits it or not, to help him stop the Blight as the last Fereldan Grey Warden. Strange, though, how leaving her behind has begun to feel like venturing into danger unarmed.

Leliana is the only one of us who knows how to deal with locks, so I must bring her, as we are trespassing. Wynne’s healing skills could be invaluable as well. Will three be enough? Maker take me, I am so tired.

\--

I told Morrigan she was not to come with me, and she struck me across the face. It was too sudden to deflect; I’d been expecting a lecture, not a blow.

“I knew it,” she spat.   
  
“Do that again,” I said, “and Maker help me, I will strike you back.”

“I should never have let you touch me,” she said. “I humor your desires once, and suddenly I am your precious pet to be protected? More the fool I, for daring hope one man did his thinking above the waist.”

I told her she should save her tantrums for her mother. “I leave you here,” I said, “because you have made it clear that you think saving these people is a foolhardy side errand. Furthermore, if that foolish errand should claim my life, I do not trust Alistair to end the Blight by himself.”

“If that foolish errand should claim your life,” she said, “I will spit on your corpse.”

I tried to take her hand; it was icy with fear when she snatched it away. I do not know how to reassure her without forcing her to admit that she is afraid, and so I have left her to her misery. I shall deal with her later, or not, as the case may be. Let her cry her wretched self to sleep if this ends up being our last conversation. I haven’t the energy just now to coddle her peculiarities.

I think I shall bring Sten with me to the castle. I could use someone honest at my back just now.

\--

Maker’s bootheel, sometimes I wish I’d died at Ostagar.

Arl Eamon’s son is possessed by a demon. It is the boy who has been laying waste to his own home, to the town. For sport.

We learned what had happened with the help of a blood mage, Jowan, who was languishing in the castle dungeon after being ordered by Teyrn Fucking Loghain to poison the arl. Loghain told Jowan that Arl Eamon was a threat to Ferelden. Does this sound like a tangled knotted mess to you? That’s because it is. It bloody well fucking is.

The boy, Connor, had begun to show magical talent, and the arlessa feared that if Eamon knew, he would send the boy to the Circle and she would never see him again. So the stupid selfish woman looked for an apostate to tutor him. She was so careless in her inquiries that somehow Teyrn Loghain found out and sent his apostate agent Jowan to serve as tutor--and to remove “threat to Ferelden” Arl Eamon in the process. 

Just how long has the Teyrn been hatching plans to eliminate half the powerful people in Ferelden? Was my family part of this plot? The timing suggests that it must be connected. Whatever Loghain is scheming, whether he is right about Arl Eamon or not, his timing could not be worse. Has anyone but me and a handful of friends noticed that there is a damned Blight on?  
  
What I wouldn’t give for an audience with Loghain now--an audience with the man who looked me in the eye at Ostagar, spoke respectfully to me, possibly knowing that my entire family had just been slaughtered to serve his greater plans to “save” Ferelden. From what? Does he see something I cannot, or has he gone entirely mad? 

By the time I found Jowan he’d been tortured by the arlessa’s men for days. Between that and his obviously sincere determination to find some way to help with the demon, I released him. I’d left my other demon expert behind, you see.

And what deal did the demon make with Connor? Why did the boy let the creature possess him? Because it promised to save his father’s life. And it did, in a manner of speaking. The poison should have killed him long ago, but the demon did something to arrest his body’s processes so that he is trapped eternally in slumber, neither dying nor recovering. This is how a demon keeps its promises.

My head hurts, and I feel ill.

Once we found the boy and learned of his deal with the demon, Jowan reappeared and announced that the only way to stop this evil was either to kill the boy, or for Jowan to do a blood magic ritual, bleeding someone dry in order to send another mage into the Fade to confront and (possibly) sever the connection to the demon from that side.

Of course Jowan is a blood mage. He might have mentioned that before I let him out of his cell. Now that he has dangled the power of blood magic in front of everyone, Arlessa Isolde is demanding that she be allowed to sacrifice herself for her son. She wasn’t there at Kinloch Hold. She doesn’t know what blood magic can do, the horrors it can unleash. 

I understand that she wants to save Connor, but if she wanted that, if she cared more about her son’s needs than her own, she would have allowed him to be trained properly at the Circle. He’d still be there, with the children Wynne and Sten protected, traumatized but alive. But because she wanted to keep his power secret, even from his own father, the boy is now possessed by a demon. He is already gone. 

Of course she can’t see that; she’s his mother. My mother could never see the evil in me, either.

<<Blessed are they who stand before  
The corrupt and the wicked and do not falter.  
Blessed are the peacekeepers, the champions of the just.  
Blessed are the righteous, the lights in the shadow.  
In their blood the Maker’s will is written.>>

I’m sorry, Isolde, but the son you tried so selfishly to keep close to you has gone so far that only more evil can bring him back. I will not murder you at the urging of the same blood mage who poisoned your husband.

The boy is already gone. I have to keep telling myself that. He is already gone.

  
  



	5. Reclamation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Aedan Cousland recovers three lost things without realizing how important any of them truly are.

12 Bloomingtide

Location: Redcliffe Village  
Weather: Warm, overcast  
Health: Rested  
Temper: Melancholic  
Events: Death of Connor Guerrin

The people of Redcliffe are gathered at the lakeshore, watching the boats burn. One by one the dead are laid to rest in rowboats, sometimes alone, sometimes in family groups, children nestled between their parents. There are so many; this could go on for hours. The best surviving archers light their arrows and loose them as the boats drift away onto the great lake. 

I watched for a while, respectfully, but no one was expected to witness the whole of the ritual; even the archers worked in shifts. And I needed to be alone. I walked up the hill, toward our camp, followed by ghosts.

Before I killed him, Connor Guerrin was lucid, briefly. I think the demon gave him control for a moment deliberately, in an attempt to weaken my resolve. The boy was ten years old, with a regal nose, auburn hair parted in the middle like Oren’s but lighter, and shadows under his eyes.

He was disoriented. I did not mince words; I told him that the demon he’d bargained with had possessed him and used him to kill most of the people in the castle and the village. I told him what had to be done. I think I wanted him to fight me, or to cry, or to make himself a nuisance - to be the spoiled noble brat I expected his doting mother had made of him. But he didn’t do any of those things. He just looked tired, and asked me two questions.

First, he asked what would happen to him after he died. I told him he would go to the Maker’s side. He said he was afraid that the Maker would be angry with him for what he did. I told him the Maker would see and admire how bravely he was accepting the consequences. I told him that he was braver than some adults I had recently spoken to. I did not mention that I was speaking of his mother.

Then he asked me if it would hurt. I told him I would end it quickly.

But then the demon took him over again. And fought. It wasn’t quick, not at all; the abomination was too powerful. It took four of us to take it down. But we did.

Arlessa Isolde came in and saw, after the fight was over. Saw what looked like a helpless child, limp and bloody in my arms.

I wonder if Oren died first, at Highever. If Oriana screamed like that, when she saw his body.

Afterward, still numb, I asked Bann Teagan leave to go through the correspondence in the arl’s study for anything that might help us untangle what had happened between him and Loghain. He allowed it, but I found nothing to explain why Loghain considered Eamon a danger to Ferelden, or any evidence of a growing rift between them. 

I did find a strange locket, though. It had the flame of Andraste engraved upon it, and it had been shattered, but mended. It must have been the arlessa’s. My first thought was that perhaps Connor had broken it, and that Eamon had carefully glued it back together as a surprise. A child’s carelessness, so easily mended.

Reader, I don’t know how to explain it, but I suddenly felt as though there were a sword in my chest. For a moment I could not draw breath. I shut the door to the arl’s study and just sat at his desk with my head in my hands for at least a third of an hour.

Some things can’t be mended. People must understand that. To try to go back, to think of what might have been, is madness.

No sooner had I returned to camp than Alistair confronted me. Wynne had told him what had happened, and he was furious. He, a templar, thought I should have sacrificed an innocent woman with blood magic to save the boy. I don’t think Alistair even knew Connor; I think it had more to do with the fact that Arlessa Isolde had forced Eamon to send Alistair to the templars when he was young, and that Alistair would have liked to see her dead. I did not voice this thought; I simply told Alistair that I had done the best I could with the choices I was given. 

I don’t think I said it harshly, but something must have struck him, because for the first time he seemed to see me, and I saw him master himself, master his anger. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him look beyond his own emotions. I stayed and talked with him for a while, but we spoke of other things. The physical changes that take place in Grey Wardens after the Joining, and whether there is a possibility of contacting members of the order in Orlais or the Free Marches. There isn’t. It would take weeks just to travel to the nearest Orlesian city, and even if we found any Grey Wardens to bring back with us, there is no guarantee Loghain wouldn’t find a way to have them all slaughtered the moment they crossed the border.

I think this must be about Orlais, in fact. It’s the only common thread. Eamon married an Orlesian; King Cailan was on good terms with Empress Celene. The Grey Wardens are an international order. Does Teyrn Loghain think Orlais is preparing for another invasion? These are the thoughts I should be dwelling on. Strategy, and politics, and how to win allies when everywhere I go, death follows like the Blight itself.

I took the locket from Eamon’s study. Carried it with me. I don’t know why.

Histories never speak of the feelings of generals and kings. They speak of how they were loved or hated by those they led, feared or disdained, and how that affected the outcome of a battle or nation. So long as I am the object of loyalty, love, fear, or all three, what happens in my heart--or fails to happen when it should--is irrelevant to the greater course of history.

14 Justinian

Location: Camp south of Lake Calenhad  
Weather: Hot, humid  
Health: Adequate  
Temper: Even  
Events: A detour and an intimate tryst

Morrigan has been strangely subdued the last few weeks, as we made our way carefully along the west shore of Lake Calenhad toward Sulcher’s Pass en route to Orzammar. She did not seem sullen; quite the opposite in fact. There was something almost placating in her manner. She took her turn cooking, quietly readied herself whenever it was time to move camp, and said nothing when I chose others to accompany me on minor scouting missions. I began to wonder if this was not her version of an apology for her behavior in Redcliffe.

Spending less time managing Morrigan has given me more time to speak with the others. Zevran has told me tales of Antiva’s fine leathercrafters and dark-haired beauties; Wynne has told me of her deprived childhood and her love for the security and grandeur of the Circle; Sten has confessed to a sort of homesickness, an out-of-place feeling surrounded by those who do not speak his native tongue. I had let Morrigan slip to the back of my mind, all but forgotten, and perhaps she noticed, and that is why she addressed me coyly as I passed one evening, telling me how cold it was, alone in her tent.

When I turned my steps toward her, my intent was to rebuke her for toying with me. But somehow, between my reluctance to set off her temper again and my appreciation for the way the firelight caressed the bare curve of her waist, I ended up following her into the tent instead.

I know how to treat a woman gently, to show enough respect in the act of lovemaking that I am not ill-spoken of afterward. Growing up, I had a certain reputation to uphold at home, and a woman will only stroke her own ego via malicious gossip if her ego is not stroked well enough in bed. Furthermore, if you do not have enough respect for a woman to be sincerely thrilled that she would take such a risk for you, then you have no business bedding the woman in the first place. As much as Morrigan has frequently irked me, there can be no doubt of my profound admiration for her. There can be no doubt that I counted myself exquisitely fortunate.

And so I have no explanation for what happened when we were tangled together, bare and hungry, on the furs she uses as a bed. I do not know if it was her that made me lose my senses--the lithe, musky softness of her, the low murmurs in my ear, the sudden bruising pain of my bitten shoulder--or if it was something that has changed in me since the Joining, something akin to the voracious way I devour my meals since Ostagar, every bite feeling like the first in days. I devoured her body in the same way, in a haze not unlike my battle-rage, and when I should have been spent I simply… kept going, kept the same desperate animal rhythm, in a way that should not have been physically possible.

She was surprised but not at all displeased, despite the fact that by the end, when I exhausted myself for a third and final time with no break between, she might just as well have been a two-copper whore, or a sheep, or a ragged old towel for all I cared about anything but the use of her. I blacked out briefly, then found my senses again. Whatever frenzy had overtaken me was now past; I was myself again. We spoke, a little, her fingertips roaming my scalp beneath my hair. I felt strangely tender toward her, though I knew better than to say so. She had nothing but praise for my performance and said I was welcome to come to her again, or not, as we both wished, and that it need mean nothing more than that.

Maker, I am not certain I could survive a second night.

As to why we are now heading south, rather than continuing north through Sulcher’s Pass, we ran into a vulnerable lone merchant who gave us what he claims is a golem control rod. Golems, unfortunate reader, are a legendary and now exceedingly rare dwarven invention - constructs of stone that fight with the ferocity and skill of men, but without independent will. This merchant had the rod, but the golem itself has been abandoned in a southern village called Honnleath, now overrun by darkspawn. He of course had no intention of venturing there. 

That meant the merchant had no use whatsoever for the rod, but bandits kept mistaking it for something valuable, to his detriment, so at this point he was willing to give it away at no charge. I conferred with my companions, and all of them agreed that his story, strange as it was, showed no signs of being a fabrication. In fact, Leliana had heard tales of a mage from that very region that had once had a golem at his command during the war for independence from Orlais. 

Given how useful a mindless stone soldier - immune to disease and Blight - might be in a fight against darkspawn, and given the fact that Wynne and Zevran could use some practice fighting darkspawn while there is still no sign of an Archdemon to organize them, we thought it worth a detour. We will investigate the situation, for better or worse, and then retrace our path to Orzammar.

20 Justinian

Location: Sulcher’s Pass (again)  
Weather: Sultry  
Health: Unpredictable  
Temper: Bleak  
Events: Another abomination, awakening of Shale

First, unfortunate reader, let me address my state of mind, so that you might subtract it from my account of the facts and better find whatever truth lies in this entry.

I am angry at the Maker. He is no better than Arl Howe, if He doesn’t understand the implied contract of nobility: that we are to care for the things that belong to us. He finds His first children the spirits too dull, and so He abandons them to create a new world and “better” children, putting the Veil between us. When His lonely firstborn children manage to seduce his second born into worshiping them by actually - heavens forfend - _speaking_ to them directly, does the Maker admit His mistake and try to care better for both halves of His wounded creation? No, He abandons the lot of it. Doesn’t even bother destroying it; just walks away and leaves the mess He created to play out toward its slow and agonizing dissolution. If not for the intervention of Andraste, this whole world would have by now died a slow death. And lately, I begin to think that all She did was slow it further.

There was another abomination in Honnleath. Another child. A little girl this time, with yellow braids, who wandered too far into that damned mage Wilhelm’s basement lair, where he’d kept a desire demon captive and experimented on it. I went into the basement looking for information on how to wake the golem, which was inert at the center of the village.

The demon was still there, more than twenty years after Wilhelm’s death. The mage’s journal was there, too; the Circle knew of his experiments and allowed them to continue. The demon appears to have influenced the golem, causing it to crush every bone in Wilhelm’s body just before it deactivated. I believe the demon thought that the mage’s death would free it. Instead, that meant it was alone in that basement for decades, until that little girl found it while fleeing darkspawn.

Of course it had to be me who slew her. Of course it is always me who ends up cleaning the mess that mages leave, because no one else is watching out for any of us. I have nothing but love for Andraste, even still, but her “husband” is a feckless infant who, in a just existence, would not have had the power to shape a handful of wet sand, let alone two entire worlds. Andraste would not be the first woman to marry a dim-witted brute for fear of what might happen if she spurned his attentions. I have nothing but sympathy for Her.

At any rate, we have a golem now. I say we “have” a golem in the same sense that we “have” an assassin, because the control rod appears to be broken. The rod woke the thing, but it no longer controls it. To my surprise though, the golem seems as intelligent and reasonable as anyone else in our party, perhaps more so than Alistair. A bit sarcastic, perhaps, and with a murderous hatred of all things avian after too long suffering the indignities of their perching, but otherwise rather like a person in all ways aside from, er, physical composition. It calls itself Shale, and is, luckily for us, very interested in slaying darkspawn and, like Zevran, has absolutely nowhere else to go and no other company to keep. And so here we all are.

Zevran, as I suspected, has taken to me very swiftly. I sat with him for a long while last night when I needed distraction, letting him tell me stories of his adventures in the glittering gem that is Antiva City, including a conspiracy to kill a prince and the humorously accidental assassination of a dangerous mage just after she had seduced him into abandoning the job. I don’t think the elf is used to being listened to; in fact, I’m actually slightly concerned that he may fancy me. He does call me “handsome” a great deal, and dwell in loving detail on how heroically I spared his life. Perhaps it’s more of his typical extravagant flair, but given his sad and loveless history, he does seem the sort whose untapped heart might overflow at the slightest kindness.

I’m not offended on principle, though I’ve never had that sort of relationship with a man. But I think Morrigan is more than enough to keep my life complicated. I’ve been trying to walk a fine line between being warm enough to encourage Zevran’s friendship without leading him down a path that might end in heartbreak - or, more to the point - end in a sudden desire for revenge which I’ve no doubt he could see through brilliantly. I am generally good at these sorts of balancing acts, though, so let us see how it plays out.

Next we are headed to Orzammar. I would say that I hope our business there will be relatively simple, but Bodahn, the dwarven merchant who has taken to sharing our camp on occasion and traveling in our shadow, says that rumor has it the king there is dead. Of course he is. I imagine we’ll get there and discover that he was murdered by Teyrn Loghain on suspicion of Orlesian conspiracy. If I’m right, I can at least be smug in my skills at prognostication. And if it’s something else entirely, honestly I’ll be relieved for a bit of variety in the catastrophes I’m called upon to stop.

I’ll tell you one reason I’m pleased to be heading to Orzammar: dwarves have no connection to the Fade whatsoever. That means no mages. That means no demon-possessions.

I’m sure I’ll find some reason to murder a child, though, if I stay in the city long enough. Do keep turning these pages, unfortunate reader, and find out.

8 Solace

Location: Orzammar  
Weather: Clear and sunny on the surface, I presume  
Health: Good  
Temper: Even  
Events: A recovered soul, dwarven politics

As reported, the dwarven king Endrin Aeducan has recently died, and when we arrived at the surface gates after a tiring journey up into the Frostbacks, the guards informed us that no one would be allowed into the city until a successor was chosen. Before returning to camp to inform my allies of our unfortunate timing, I searched among the merchants at the surface, and damned if I didn’t run into my first bit of luck since I last went to sleep at Highever Castle: I found Faryn, looter of qunari blades.

Imagine my shock when I learned that the man had recently sold the blade to Dwyn, the dwarven mercenary I bullied into helping the people of Redcliffe Village. The damned dwarf must have overheard my conversation with Sten about the blade and decided he wanted it for himself (he is something of a weapons collector, and a qunari blade must be rare this far south). It seemed a better-than-even bet that Dwyn would still be in Redcliffe. Once a man fights to defend something, he tends to become attached to it, and it isn’t as though the town is in danger of overcrowding lately. Since we were waiting for the wheels of dwarven government to turn anyhow, I thought that a return to Redcliffe might allow me to check in on the arl as well as relieve Dwyn of the sword by whatever means necessary.

Redcliffe itself is recovering nicely, but Arl Eamon’s condition is unchanged. Arlessa Isolde still refuses to speak to me, and Eamon’s knights are still scouring the countryside for any sign of the Urn of Sacred Ashes. The locals said Dwyn was still living in the village, but when we arrived, he was nowhere to be found. I kicked in the door of his house, for old times’ sake. It was not difficult to find where he had stashed the blade; a two-handed qunari weapon is not a dainty thing. I took great pleasure in confiscating it from the underhanded bastard and returning it to Sten at camp.

I could see, in the way Sten turned the blade this way and that, checking its edge for damage, that he was as intimately familiar with its balance as he was with his own limbs. Quietly, as his eyes scoured the blade, he said that I must be an “ashkaari” to have found a single sword in a country at war. (An ashkaari is, apparently, a sort of enlightened scholar or philosopher.) Once he was certain the sword was not damaged he sheathed it, and what I saw in his gaze then was something that has never quite been directed at me before. It is, I imagine, the way that Loghain Mac Tir’s men must have looked at him as he led them to victory in the rebellion. 

The loss of Sten’s “asala” or soul was the reason he could not return to his arishok, and so I asked him if he would now be leaving us. He replied that he was sent here to answer the question, “What is the Blight?” and that he could provide a more satisfying answer if he had helped end it.

I had assumed that by returning Sten’s soul to him, I was also freeing him from my service. I did not realize how deeply I dreaded releasing him until he declared his intention to stay. I think he saw my relief, sensed that some powerful bond had formed between us, because he turned away then and spent the rest of the evening talking to my dog.

I appreciate the way he talks to Bricks. He uses the same tone he does with me, and the hound listens to him attentively, with an air of great respect. Sten talks to him of weapons, and of war. He always speaks to him in our common tongue, choosing his words carefully, as though he knows that mabari understand more than just tone. Bricks allows Leliana to caress him and Wynne to bathe him, and he still whines with submissive adoration each time Morrigan passes, but Sten he treats as he would a fellow mabari, and that is so great an honor that I feel almost slighted by comparison.

With a newly armed and newly loyal qunari in our company, we returned to the gates of Orzammar to find that their Assembly is still deadlocked and civil war brewing. One of Loghain’s lackeys was there, also demanding entrance for himself and his entourage. Perhaps my desire to humiliate the man was what inspired me to pull out the actual treaties and present them to the guard, who - to the lackey’s outrage - allowed me to pass. The lackey called the Wardens “traitors to the king” and looked on the verge of drawing his sword until I stared him down and told him to consider his men’s chances against two Grey Wardens, a Mabari war dog, an archer, an assassin, two mages, a Qunari, and a golem. His hand left his hilt immediately. I only regret that he had no tail for me to watch tuck between his legs as he retreated.

The situation in Orzammar was even worse than I imagined. It has come to sporadic bloodshed in the streets between the factions. Dwarves do not express anger with fists, but with axes buried in the skull. One side is saying that Prince Bhelen Aeducan framed one of his brothers for the murder of the other, fatally breaking his father’s heart (possibly with the aid of poison) and putting himself conveniently next in line. The other side is saying that Lord Harrowmont is a doddering weakling who spreads these lies because he fears that Prince Bhelen will forge much-needed changes, undermining the caste system and breaking Orzammar’s isolation from the surface. The chaos in the streets has allowed a third faction, a “casteless” criminal carta from Dust Town, to spill out into the Commons and extort merchants with impunity.

I spoke to representatives of both candidates for the throne, and while I do think the prince has good ideas about how to rule, the way he has chosen to seize power reminds me too much of Loghain and Howe. All but the shadiest sort of people are in agreement that King Endrin named Lord Harrowmont as his chosen successor before he died (though it is ultimately up to the Assembly). I was forced to back one contender or the other if I want help against the Blight, and I cannot bear to side with one who would commit murder to seize power, even if what he hopes to do with that power is admirable. And so it seems that for the next while I shall be running errands for House Harrowmont in hopes of getting an audience with its paranoid patriarch.

Given the trail of blood and betrayal that seems to follow Prince Bhelen’s enemies, I cannot say I blame the old man.


	6. Orzammar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aedan delves deeply into dwarven politics. Perhaps too deeply.

14 Solace

Location: Orzammar  
Weather: N/A  
Health: Good  
Temper: Tense, caged  
Events: Proving what, exactly?

Later this evening, after we have sufficiently prepared, a small group of companions and I will head to Dust Town to invade the headquarters of one Jarvia, no house name, leader of the gang of “casteless” criminals who have lately seized upon the political chaos in order to wreak havoc in Orzammar. I do this at the behest of the man that I hope, for my sake, will be the next dwarven king: Lord Pyral Harrowmont. I was finally able to meet the leery old codger, and all I had to do to earn an audience with him was to slaughter ten innocent dwarves in front of a roaring crowd.

Dwarven politics are strange in the extreme.

Despite my naturally warlike disposition, my upbringing has attuned me to the vital nature of diplomacy and cultural sensitivity, and so I spent the first few days of my stay here in Orzammar browsing the Shaperate’s library, researching dwarven history and politics before wading into the current morass. Their Shaper of Memories, Czibor, was most patient with my questions. Also, amusingly, he offered to buy Shale from me. Apparently there are only a dozen or so golems remaining in Orzammar, out of what was once an entire legion of the things. I do not think the good Shaper was expecting Shale itself to reply to his purchase offer, much less to state that it would “sooner jump into a pit of lava.”

As is my usual habit with my companions, I’ve been trying to get to “know” Shale, but that process is made difficult by the golem’s sardonic attitude as well as by the vagueness of its memories. The golem must be hundreds of years old, since the Paragon Caridin - the only dwarf with the knowledge of how to construct golems - lived centuries ago and never passed on his secrets. A shame. I cannot imagine a more perfect army against a Blight. 

Regarding Shale’s individual history, all I can ascertain is that the golem was found somewhere in the Deep Roads by the mage Wilhelm and reactivated. It fought with him during Loghain’s rebellion, and then it was brought to Honnleath, where I believe Wilhelm’s experiments on both the golem and the desire demon led to his brutal demise. Aside from this abbreviated history, and the fact that Shale seems to like shiny rocks, I know next to nothing useful about it, and as there is no one left more likely to remember than Shale itself, I suppose that is how things will stay.  
  
Anyhow, where was I? Oh yes, the Shaperate. The most currently relevant thing a non-dwarven reader needs to know from my research is that dwarves have a strict hierarchical caste system. There are only two ways out of the caste your same-sex parent was born into. 

The first: achieve something so heroic that you are named a Paragon - more or less a living Ancestor or god - and your entire house is lifted to nobility. This was most recently achieved by a member of the smith caste named Branka, who responded to the honor by telling Orzammar to sod off and dragging her entire house (with the embarrassing exception of her husband, apparently) into the Deep Roads to look for some treasure or other. That was two years ago, so she’s likely dead. A Paragon indeed.

The second: do something so heinous that you are stripped of ALL caste and essentially shunned by everyone other than fellow casteless. Since no one without a caste legally exists and therefore cannot be legally served in any way by those who do exist, the casteless are all either beggars or criminals. The latter have become organized, and Jarvia has lately risen to rule them with an iron fist. 

Now, if Harrowmont can take credit for eliminating her and her lieutenants, support in the Assembly will swing toward him for the throne... or at least that is the going theory. A sound enough theory that I’m willing to risk my life on it, such as the risk is. We both know, unfortunate reader, that I’ve already repeatedly waded both into and out of far worse than a den of dwarven thugs.

Also, as mentioned above, I’ve gotten some practice at killing dwarves. Apparently the noble caste has a history of letting the “Ancestors” decide who has the right in their quarrels by choosing members of the warrior caste to fight as their champions. These “Provings” are done for an audience, and while in principle they are not required to be fought to the death, in practice restraint ends up being... impractical. I fought in the Provings in Lord Harrowmont’s name against Prince Bhelen’s champions, and in the name of modesty, I shall only say that the Ancestors clearly want Harrowmont to rule, and with a brutal swiftness.

The final fight, though, was my diplomatic _piece de resistance_. The final match of the Proving is designed for two units of four to fight against one another. Instead of recruiting three of my companions to join me, I called in Baizyl Harrowmont, as well as Gwiddon of the warrior caste. In this way, not only did I clean the arena with Piotin Aeducan’s team despite being outnumbered, I brazenly displayed the talents of the very same men Prince Bhelen had tried, through underhanded means, to keep from fighting against his men in the contest. So now yet another Aeducan is dead. Even at his most paranoid, Lord Harrowmont could not possibly be deluded that I might be a double agent for his nemesis after that performance.

Now that Harrowmont is finished testing my loyalty, he can with confidence employ me as an agent in his war against the Carta. If all this murder and politicking earns me the allies I need against the Blight, it will be worth it.

Alistair has begun to whine a bit about always being left out of our adventures, and so I’m going to allow him to come with us to the Carta hideout. It’s an important enough outing - at the behest of the future King of Orzammar! - that it will help him feel relevant to our mission, but it should be a relatively straightforward slaughter and unlikely to get him killed. I’ll bring Wynne along as well to make certain of that. Leliana ought to round out the group well enough; the three of them seem to work well together, and her skills are always useful.

I’ve finally managed to earn enough of her confidence that she has revealed to me what I was already beginning to suspect: before she came to the Chantry in Lothering she was a sort of spy and assassin in Orlais, what they call a “bard” there. Bards are hired by noble patrons to eliminate rivals by deadly or other means in what they call the Great Game. Orlais sounds like such a charming place. At any rate, apparently her career as a bard ended in some unspecified but ugly manner, and so she came to Ferelden seeking shelter. She found it at the Chantry, but her “vision” has compelled her to follow me back into adventure.

Her strong Andrastian faith makes her a good match for the righteous Wynne and our former templar, but she drives Morrigan and Sten utterly batty. The other day she suggested that Morrigan should try putting her hair up and wearing a red velvet dress with gold embroidery and a low-cut bodice. Morrigan scoffed at the idea, but quite honestly I think Leliana is on to something. I cannot imagine anything more splendid than Morrigan in red velvet.

Unfortunate reader, I look back over my earlier entries and see my caution regarding her, and I cannot tell if I was paranoid before, or I am ensorcelled now. At a shop here in Orzammar I found a golden hand mirror, and was instantly reminded of a childhood reminiscence she had shared with me in camp. It seems Flemeth once caught her with a stolen mirror and smashed it into shards to teach her some sort of lesson about vanity or being “soft” or some such. On impulse, I bought the mirror for her and presented it to her. At first she was suspicious, demanding to know the price she must pay for it. When I explained that it was simply a gift, she confessed that she’d never been given a gift before. She said it was very like the one she had coveted as a girl, and she was visibly moved by the gesture.

Though I had made it clear there was nothing she needed to do in exchange, the next day she presented me with a ring. Immediately she disabused me of any notion that the gift might be sentimental. It is a magic ring, she told me, one that Flemeth had given her to allow them to find each other should they ever be separated. She said she had managed to alter its magic so that it linked her to me rather than her mother. She claimed that given my importance to the fate of the world and whatnot, it would be practical for her to have some means of tracking me should I be captured.

The more she explained it, however, the more moved I was by the implications. Leaving aside the basic symbolism of presenting a lover with a ring, she has transferred a bond between herself and her mother to a bond between herself and me, and has used her magic to ensure that we might never lose one another. Am I a fool, or is she trying as hard as she can to be romantic without being caught at it?

Solace, exact date uncertain

Location: The Deep Roads  
Weather: A distant memory.  
Health: Good  
Temper: Unnerved  
Events: Death of Jarvia, civil unrest, expedition into Deep Roads

I write this entry in a place of ghosts, the ruins of a dwarven thaig deep underground, lost to the darkspawn half a millennium ago during the Fourth Blight. How I came to be here will take some time to recount, but I have taken a madman’s camp, and should be safe enough to write for now and rest. 

First, I must relate the conclusion of our mission to eliminate Jarvia. The Carta’s headquarters turned out to be an expansive, meandering stone warren hiding behind a single unassuming door in the Dust Quarter that appeared to lead to nothing more than a small abandoned shop. Upon entering the shop with a finger-bone token I had terrified a Carta lackey into giving me, I fought past the small group set to guard the hidden back exit and followed the tunnel to the headquarters. I mapped those hidden passages and rooms systematically, and I am proud to say that not a single criminal had the chance to leave that place alive, and that includes Jarvia, whom we finally slew after a terrifying and chaotic close-quarters battle in a room full of cunning archers, quick-bladed assassins, and fire traps.  
  
As planned, I did bring Alistair along, and he was… well, reader, he was a disaster. I’ll grant that over the course of our little adventure he seemed to learn from his mistakes to a certain extent, but at the beginning I wasn’t sure he would make it out of there alive, even with Wynne there to keep his soul stubbornly attached to his body. He means well, but he has no finesse, and obviously very little experience. As embarrassing as it will be for him -- what with his technically outranking me in the Wardens -- I am going to have to insist that he allow me to train him.

We did survive the fight, however, and afterward, carefully stepping over all the archer corpses and tripwires, we found a door at the southeast end of that room that opened only with a key found on Jarvia’s body. We did not immediately realize that this door was a last-ditch escape route Jarvia had been too overconfident to use, not until Alistair applied his shoulder to the seemingly “jammed” door only to have it burst through a thin layer of plaster and into the Orzammar Commons. To be exact, into the shop of one Janar of the smith caste: a singularly unpleasant dwarf who insisted he had no idea that the Carta planned to use his property as an emergency exit. Did he expect us to believe that the Carta installed a door in his wall and plastered it over from his side without his knowledge?

Brief amusing sidebar: Janar’s redheaded daughter Dagna accosted us on our way out of the shop. She is a prepossessing if somewhat eccentric girl of nineteen who was determined to travel to the Circle of Magi -- with their permission of course -- to study magic. Not spellcasting, as that would be impossible for a dwarf, but theory, runemaking, that sort of thing. I had to break the terrible news to her that the Circle is no more – I may have fudged the truth a bit and said that the Right of Annulment was called – but that only steeled her determination to go and help them rebuild. Her father will disown her from family and caste the moment she sets foot on the surface, but honestly I can’t see that Dagna will be losing much in that transaction, and it’s none of my affair in any event.

Back to more pressing matters. I had thought that with Jarvia dead the worst of my trials in Orzammar would be over with, but little did I know they were only beginning. Simply getting back to Harrowmont to report in was no easy matter. I can’t seem to go anywhere in this city anymore without being jumped either by what’s left of the Carta or by Prince Bhelen’s supporters. I’ve begun leaving dwarven corpses behind me in the streets wherever I go.

Ah, but if only street ambushes had been the extent of Bhelen’s counterstrike! When we arrived at the Harrowmont estate (all of us blood-spattered despite having already changed clothes once), Harrowmont relayed the news that Prince Bhelen has sent a small unit of men to look for Orzammar’s latest Paragon, Branka. This could mean very bad news for the election, despite our victory over Jarvia. 

Two years ago, Paragon Branka took nearly her entire house into the Deep Roads in search of something -- of what, Harrowmont could not be certain. Not a soul from House Branka, once numbering three hundred or so, has returned. Prince Bhelen clearly believes that the house survives down there somehow (an idea at first incomprehensible to me, from what Alistair explained to me of the Deep Roads, where Wardens go to die at the miserable end of their lives). Needless to say, a Paragon’s endorsement would render the entire vote more or less superfluous. Even finding and returning her remains would apparently be enough to sway voters; I cannot state enough how venerated the Paragons are in Orzammar.

Prince Bhelen may have gotten a head start on this idea, but Harrowmont has two things the prince did not: a map to Branka’s last known location, and a Grey Warden. The dwarves’ fallen Deep Roads are the territory of the darkspawn now, but I am immune to darkspawn corruption via the rituals that Wardens undertake at the Joining. All I have to do is keep the wretched things from decapitating me, and I shall come out in as good health as I went in. Given the difficulty of our task, however, I opted not to go alone. But who to drag into the very den of the tainted beast?

Shale is immune to the darkspawn taint by virtue of having no blood, so I decided to bring it along as a bodyguard of sorts. I also decided to bring Zevran. I told him I needed his skills as a scout, but my true reason was that he was the only member of our group whose throat I knew I would have no hesitation about cutting should it become necessary.

(Unfortunately, as of this writing, he has begun to grow on me.)

As the three of us approached the entrance to the mines that lead to the Deep Roads, we were stopped by a half-drunk dwarf with a blazing red festoon of a moustache and atrocious manners. He was looking for a Grey Warden, and he thought that I looked the part, aside from lacking a visibly radiant aura of holy purity. Was I going to the Deep Roads, he wanted to know, and if so, could he tag along so we could put our heads together? We were both after the same thing, you see, for different reasons, and he claimed he knew things about the situation I didn’t.

His name is Oghren. Just Oghren. No house name on account of having killed a young man in some way apparently frowned upon even in Orzammar. But his former house name? Branka. He is, in fact, Paragon Branka’s husband. Given that he was the only member of her house left behind in Orzammar when she went to the Deep Roads two years ago, I’m assuming she was not deeply in love. I can’t imagine whether she objected to his drinking, his constant lecherous commentary, his surliness, or his constant expulsion of bodily gases from both ends, but perhaps she can enlighten us if we ever find her.

Oghren did, however, have useful information, as promised. I had the map to a once highly-trafficked road intersection known as Caridin’s Cross, given to me by Lord Harrowmont, but Oghren knew where Branka would have been going from there: the fabled Ortan Thaig. Branka was in search of something called the Anvil of the Void: the means by which Orzammar had once created its legion of golems, lost to the dwarves along with Ortan Thaig during the Fourth Blight five centuries ago. 

This new piece of information gave me new hope that Branka might, in fact, have somehow survived. Previously, I had assumed I would be doing nothing more than finding and honoring her remains, because who in their right mind would spend two years in the darkspawn-infested Deep Roads rather than return defeated after a few hellish months of searching? But if Branka had in fact found this Anvil of the Void, her efforts to rediscover its proper manner of use could easily account for her two-year absence.

A deal was a deal, and so we descended into the depths of the void, an unlikely quartet, in hopes of somehow picking up a Paragon’s trail.

There are darkspawn in the Deep Roads, yes, though far fewer than I expected. There were other unpleasant denizens as well. Spiders the size of bears, and what Oghren called “tezpadam.” I don’t yet know if there is a Fereldan word for these creatures; this is the first time I’ve ever seen one. Mind this, though: if you should ever see one, you are about to see a dozen. Then twenty. Then fifty. They hunt in packs, you see, and they love to ambush vulnerable-looking travelers. We are fortunate that they badly underestimated our ability to defend ourselves. They’re a bit like two-legged lizards with worm-heads, and if that sounds vile, you’re imagining it correctly. Now imagine a pack of them spitting at you.

The darkspawn, however, are far more dangerous, and we were now descending into what amounts to their homeland. That was why it was so baffling to me that no matter how deeply we delved into abandoned roads and tunnels, we never stumbled into any concentrated nests of them. Even with my ability to sense them at something of a distance, I never caught a hint of more than around fifteen to twenty in a given area. They are not called a “horde” for nothing, and yet, here we were, neck-deep in their territory, and only coming across small bands of them. It confounded me. 

Not to say that fighting even so few as twenty darkspawn is at all advisable for a group our size, especially absent a healer or mage. But sometimes there is no choice but to fight our way through an area, and when we must, Zevran’s light-footed scouting has ensured that we take only two to four spawn at a time (no more than two, if one of them is an emissary spellcaster - those beasts are devastating). Regularly I instruct Zevran to get the attention of one or two patrolling at the edges, let them chase him to our isolated location where the other darkspawn cannot see, so we can quickly end them without alerting the others. Zevran has genuinely enjoyed this duty so far, often making cordial introductions when bringing us “new friends.”

He addresses me as Warden, trilling the R prettily as Antivans do. “Warden,” he would say, “allow me to introduce Stinky and Nosehole. Stinky, Nosehole, the Warden.” And then he would vanish into the shadows as if by magic just as they caught up to him. The names were different each time.

Battle does have a way of bonding people, doesn’t it? While my choice of companions for this trip was based entirely on whom I could bear to expose to darkspawn corruption, my three companions have a quality in common that has gone a long way toward making this grim trek bearable: each of them, in his own way, takes a strangely infectious pleasure in violence.

Shale’s glee crosses the line into sadism - the golem frankly revels in the pain it causes: the crunching of bone and splattering of flesh, the feeling of invulnerability and superiority that comes from seeing lesser beings squirt putrid fluids when crushed by mighty stone. Oghren is a fairly standard (if often inebriated) dwarven berserker, roaring with battle-rage, cursing with admirable fluency, and laughing raucously as his axe lops off vital pieces of his foes. For Zevran it is all a game, a dance. The golden-haired elf flits in and out of the shadows, his quips almost as cutting as his blades. I was not expecting to actually enjoy myself down here in the dead belly of the earth, and yet at moments I have caught myself smiling. We’ve been keeping score, trading boasts, and otherwise boosting one another’s morale in a dark, reeking, corrupted place that could very easily lead one to despair.

Our interactions are not always delightful, however. Although without Oghren I doubt we would ever have found the right way from Caridin’s Cross to Ortan Thaig, I find myself frequently wanting to drop-kick him into the nearest crevasse. On the approach to Ortan Thaig we ran into the team Prince Bhelen had sent… which was very interesting, to say the least, as Oghren had said he was the only one who knew exactly what Branka sought in the Deep Roads. Despite the mercenaries’ head start, they’d been using inferior maps, and so catching up to them had been simple enough. So was killing them when it turned out they had no interest in parley or joining forces. Afterward, Oghren sheepishly explained that he’d originally tried to accompany those very men, but in exchange for his information they’d simply bought him drinks till he passed out, then left without him.

I was on the verge of pounding him into the ground like an inebriated tent stake when he suddenly emitted a happy dwarven obscenity, his eyes traveling along the wall behind me. He had spotted what I would never have noticed: chips his wife taken at intervals along the walls to test the stone’s composition, a habit of hers when traveling in unknown territory. I thought at first he was simply trying to distract me from my plans to pulverize him, but sure enough we were able to follow her trail to the thaig itself. 

The actual road to it was long crumbled, but a narrow tunnel through the rock, regularly chiseled by the Paragon all down its length, showed us the way. It opened out rather suddenly, and we found ourselves standing in a vast tomb. Even a man as crude and irreverent as Oghren couldn’t help but marvel at the dark remains of a civilization, abandoned for centuries and cloaked in spiderwebs. Some of the buildings were crumbling or “overgrown” by stone from years of steady dripping, but a surprising amount of the architecture was intact.

Ghosts I expected, and was not disappointed. What I did not expect to find was a live dwarf, picking over a darkspawn corpse, but that is what greeted us around the first bend in the thaig’s main road. He fled when he spotted us, screaming, and we followed him patiently through a tunnel we’d not have spotted otherwise. It led to a small cave, where he’d made camp for… what looked like years, judging by the stash of shiny and worthless objects he’d accumulated from all throughout the ruins.

I have a knack for calming people, and so I was able to convince the poor madman that we represented no threat (even though we did, as you will see). His name was Ruck, he said, and once I got him talking, he was full of useful if chilling information. He knew nothing about Branka, but he had survived so long off the flesh of darkspawn that he had essentially all but become one of them, and he could sense their movements. He was at last able to explain why we had moved through their alleged territory with such relative ease.

They heard the song, he told us, and most of them had left to follow it. A song he too could hear, the song of the Great One, whose beauty he longed to behold but was too afraid.  
  
The song of an Archdemon.

I was still grappling with this revelation -- this first confirmation that we were, indeed, dealing with a true Blight -- when Zevran appeared behind Ruck and calmly slit his throat.

“Are you mad?” I sputtered as the poor dwarf fell facedown at my feet.

“I am sorry,” Zevran said. “Did you have more questions for him?”

“I... did not,” I admitted.

“The distraction you posed seemed the best opportunity to put him out of his misery without a fight. You did mention that’s what you would do to me, if I should become corrupted. I assumed the same rules applied here.”  
  
He wasn’t wrong. But something about it felt wrong, anyhow. Ruck had no chance to defend himself... but he would have lost that fight anyhow, and it would only have been more painful and frightening for him. Zevran is trained in delivering quick death, and he saw his chance. It does make sense. I suppose I simply do not like surprises, and I told him so.

“Ah,” he replied sadly. “I am constructed almost entirely of surprises! And here I was starting to think that you and I would become friends.”

I smiled and told him that we already were, because something about his manner convinced me that it was what he wanted to hear.

In truth, the only two of our group I have truly come to think of as friends wait for me back in Orzammar, not knowing if they should expect my return. Morrigan did not rebuke me, this time, for leaving her behind, and I do not know what that means. I can at least assure myself that she will not have her way with my other friend in my absence. Sten brilliantly put a stop to her teasing just before our trip to the Carta headquarters by agreeing to lie with her, and carefully instructing her on the necessary armor, heated prybar, and so forth that she would require in order to survive the process. I am reasonably certain he was joking, but she seemed convinced he was serious. I have never seen her reverse course so swiftly, nor turn quite so pale. There is nothing quite as endearing as my Morrigan when her arrogance deserts her.

My Morrigan. I miss her. At a moment like this, preparing to sleep miles beneath the earth in the heart of darkspawn territory, I feel the need to write what I would wish for her to read, if this book ended up being all of me that ever made it back to the surface.   
  
Morrigan, my love, if you are reading this: I care for you more than I allow myself to say aloud, more than you would wish to hear, more than I even dare think of until a moment like this, when I find myself the only soul awake in the dark. There is no accounting for taste, I suppose.

  
  



	7. The Deep Roads

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nightmare upon nightmare.

Solace, still, probably

Location: Ortan Thaig  
Weather: Musty  
Health: Good, surprisingly  
Temper: Weary  
Events: Trail of paper.

Upon waking, none of us were certain what to do next, until Oghren of all people remembered something that Ruck had said amongst his various ravings before Zevran slit his throat.

“That nutjob said spiders took ‘things of paper’ to their nest,” he told us, hunting around in Ruck’s stash in vain for who knows what--signs of Branka? Booze? “But papers from Ortan Thaig wouldn’t still be fluttering around here after four sodding centuries. So the spiders must have taken Branka’s notes. Wonder if we could salvage them, figure out where she was headed next?”

Finding the nest wasn’t difficult -- the local spiders were kind enough to lure us there, hoping (can spiders hope?) that we would be devoured by their Blight-corrupted queen. We damned near were, if I’m to be honest. Those of us so unfortunate as to be made of flesh are exhausted, rationing our food, and sleeping poorly. And thanks to that grisly and chaotic spider queen encounter, we are now completely out of healing poultices. I am regretting my decision to spare our mages this dismal trek. If I’d known that the Archdemon had largely lured the darkspawn away… but no matter. We’ve come too far to turn back. I am beginning to suspect, however, that not all of us will make it out alive. The likelihood of stumbling upon a cache of healing supplies in a dead thaig seems very unlikely. At least Shale will likely be able to report our grisly deaths to those in Orzammar, if nothing else.

Speaking of Shale, our stony friend found some rather unpleasant company down here. There were at least half a dozen golems remaining scattered throughout Ortan Thaig, dormant until we drew near. I am not certain who if anyone now holds the control rods of these creatures, but every one of them attacked us mindlessly on sight. Without Shale along I doubt we’d have survived those battles. I did notice that Shale is considerably smaller than the golems we encountered, but when I attempted to broach the subject, Shale became even more acerbic than usual. I was afraid if I pursued my curiosity further I might end up smeared across the stone streets.

Going through all the fouled papers in the spiders’ now-unoccupied nest was a long and revolting task. Zevran soon found it necessary to “scout the perimeter” while the rest of us worked, likely tired of getting rancid webs stuck in his flowing golden hair. He still hadn’t returned when Oghren finally spotted some crucial information in his wife’s handwriting: she’d determined that the Anvil was located somewhere in the Dead Trenches. 

The Dead Trenches, Oghren explained, is the current name for what was once Bownammar, headquarters of the Legion of the Dead. After being reclaimed and lost again countless times over the course of history, the once-great fortress of Bownammar is now irrevocably the territory of the darkspawn, leaving the Legion without a base of operations. And yet they continue to defend Orzammar in the King’s name, battling the darkspawn endlessly in the Deep Roads.

When Zevran returned, he was carrying a very important-looking ornate locked box. He wanted to ask my permission before picking the lock, in case it contained a demon or a severed head or a poison gas trap or something else we’d all have cause to regret. I gave him leave to try, at a great distance from the rest of us, just in case. Inside the box was… another locked box. Inside that? Another locked box. Inside that? A book, or what was left of it.

Even protected as it was, it was in the process of falling apart from age. I asked Zevran to take a look at it--of all of us he has the most delicate hands--but he said it was written entirely in dwarven. So I asked Oghren to read over his shoulder. Oghren said he could barely understand the dialect, and most of the pages were rotted to the Void anyway, but it was, amazingly, a journal of the Paragon Caridin himself, the very dwarf who built Bownammar and who forged an army of golems on the Anvil of the Void. 

Finding traces of the Paragon in his home thaig was not, in theory, surprising, but I was intrigued by the lengths he’d gone to in order to protect this particular journal--and also astonished that Branka’s people had not found it after combing the entire thaig.

Shale, upon hearing that we were reading the journal of its creator, was naturally curious and rumbled over to eavesdrop. Oghren spent some time watching Zevran carefully turn pages, and then shook his head and muttered, “Yeah, sorry, I don’t understand a sodding word of this mess.” Once Shale lost interest and returned to pulverizing spider corpses into smaller fragments (ostensibly “in case any of them had swallowed treasures” but likely just for fun), Oghren gave me a Significant Look and dragged me over to one side.

“I think it’s all about how he invented and made the golems,” Oghren said in a low growl. “I couldn’t get much, but I definitely saw the words molten lyrium and screams of agony, and a general feeling that the Paragon wanted to get blackout drunk and forget the whole thing ever happened, so… yeah. Maybe let’s not mention this to our little friend over there.”  
  
“Maybe let’s not call it ‘little’ even if we think it can’t hear us,” I replied. But I did keep quiet on the matter of Caridin’s apparent regrets. I also began to form a theory about why Branka might have pretended she never found the book. But surely she must have seen it, perhaps even understood it better than Oghren--it would certainly explain how she could have decided so confidently to proceed to the Dead Trenches. Once Oghren was finished reading what little he could, we replaced the book inside its box, and the boxes inside the boxes, and left the whole thing in Ruck’s camp to possibly retrieve on our way back out, should we be so lucky as to survive. The Shaperate would surely be grateful for such a find.

While Oghren studied spider-fouled maps and Branka’s notes, trying to figure out the best way to get to the Trenches from our current location, I pondered the implications of what was suggested by the phrases in the journal. Who was screaming? The golems themselves? Were they somehow aware during the process of their creation? I decided to have a talk with Shale, to see how far back its memory went.

The answer: not very. All it could tell me was that its former owner, a mage called Wilhelm, had experimented on it a great deal: augmenting it with various crystals and apparently somehow changing its size at his wife’s request. Before that, it had also apparently fought in a war with Wilhelm on the surface, and before that, Wilhelm had found it while scavenging in the Deep Roads. That is as far back as Shale’s memory goes, except for a vague memory of a dark place. I asked it if that dark place might be the Deep Roads themselves, the time it spent there deactivated, its control rod lying nearby waiting for Wilhelm to discover it. Since Shale had been awake and aware during its decades of paralysis in Honnleath, who is to say it wasn’t awake and paralyzed in the Deep Roads for centuries, with nothing to look at but darkness? 

At this query, for the first time since it joined our company, Shale became visibly uneasy and distressed. It said that it preferred not to consider that possibility, and then changed the subject entirely. The thing does have emotions after all, beyond rage and bloodlust. Perhaps its loss of memory is a mercy, and the only reason it does not mindlessly attack everything it sees is that it has cleverly figured out the one way to keep its traumatic creation and even more traumatic abandonment from driving it utterly mad.

Under the circumstances, I do not think I shall probe into its past further.

  
  


Date Unknown

Location: Unknown  
Weather: Unknown  
Health: Feverish  
Temper: Fading  
Events: A terrible miscalculation

Of all things, it’s a spider bite that will kill me. Not even the poison… just an ordinary infected wound, the sort of thing peasants and elves die of. I didn’t bring enough healing poultices. It’s almost more humiliating than painful, and it is very painful.

We are more than halfway to the ruins of Bownammar, where Oghren says there may be Legionnaires, with supplies. But Zevran has declared that I am not going to make it that far. I can no longer walk, and even if there are are living souls in the Dead Trenches who can help, I will surely die before anyone else could get there and back. I am so ill I don’t even mind when Zevran strokes my hair. Is he going to cut my throat, for mercy’s sake? 

I am sorry, Morrigan. Maker, I hope Alistair can rise to the occasion of this Blight, now that he has no choice.

  
  


Date Unknown

Location: Bownammar  
Weather: Blighted  
Health: Good  
Temper: Grateful  
Events: Rescue, a glimpse of the enemy, Legion of the Dead

She’d been following us all along. My treacherous, untamed Morrigan. The gift-ring I still wear allowed her to find me, and the form of a giant spider allowed her to remain unseen even when there was no convenient cover. Following her at the very limits of visual distance, so that there was no chance of my spotting them: Leliana and Wynne. We unknowingly cut a safe wake for Morrigan, who kept the path clear for her conspirators. When I became ill they realized they would have to reveal themselves in order to save me--and so now we are seven. 

Apparently, the day after I left, Sten assumed command of the group (unchallenged by Alistair) and ordered the three women to find me. That is the story Morrigan tells, at least. But I know her, and I remember that when I told her she was staying behind, she did not argue. That makes sense if she had been planning to follow me all along. Perhaps she manipulated Sten into giving the order, or perhaps that entire story was a fabrication and Sten had nothing to do with it. In either case, she is here now. 

She and Wynne saved my life, and truth be told, I feel safer with them here. Also, having Leliana as a second scout has sped our progress significantly, now that I am well enough to travel again. Sten and Bricks remain in Orzammar, because the heir to the Fereldan throne does not belong in the Deep Roads, and clearly he needs a personal guard in that shrapnel-trap of a city.

And so all was explained and forgiven, and we moved on.

Hours before we reached the great chasm separating us from the ruins of Bownammar, I began to feel something. It is impossible to describe the sensation; I must resort to metaphor. Imagine a sound like the very beginnings of thunder at the horizon, but rather than rolling and releasing in a matter of seconds, it lingers, sustained, rising with glacial slowness in response to each forward step. Only it isn’t a sound… not quite a scent, either. A sixth sense for which there is no name, alerting me to the presence of darkspawn, but on a scale I had previously not experienced or even imagined.

The distant thunder built, and built, over agonizing hours, until at last we all saw them. At the edge of the great chasm, we looked down and saw endless ranks of them, their torches as uncountable as subterranean stars. Leliana gasped, and began to cry. Zevran sat down as though his knees had been broken. Morrigan backed away from the edge, turned aside, gazed the way we’d come with a blank, unseeing expression. Oghren murmured something in dwarven that even I could tell was vile.

And then a deep, tearing, rhythmic sound made my ribcage vibrate in sympathy: the sound of impossibly large wings beating at the air. A draconic shadow alighted on a ledge in the distance, and as its weight settled, the stone around us shuddered.

The Archdemon.

I had just enough time to be transfixed by its terrible beauty--the long sinuous curve of its neck, its thorny wine-dark hide, snout like a cruel spearhead bristling with fangs and crowned with horns like the bruised rays of a painted sun--before it exhaled a torrent of purple fire and took to the air again, disappearing into the Void-cursed darkness with the heart-stopping _thrum, thrum, thrum_ of tremendous wings.

Its army, so far below, took no notice of us. How could they sense us, marching as they were by the thousands, shoulder to shoulder, driven along some circuitous path to the surface by the will of their god? We skirted the edge of the chasm toward the great Bownammar bridge, far over the army’s heads, as small as beetles from their perspective, and as insignificant. As far as I know, not one of the beasts looked up.

The Legion of the Dead was there, as Oghren had predicted, mustered at the near end of the bridge. 

In a sense, the Legionnaires are to the dwarves what the Grey Wardens are to the surface world: those from all castes who swear an irrevocable oath to die fighting darkspawn. They each hold a funeral before they leave for the Deep Roads, and the Memories name them officially dead. This frees them from regrets, from any pull at their heartstrings back to their homes and families. Their families have already mourned, and they have witnessed that grief with their own eyes. Many of them, like many Grey Wardens, take an oath to the Legion in lieu of execution or imprisonment for serious crimes, because they would sooner die in battle.

They are not, on the whole, a friendly group.

Their leader, Kardol, did not deign to speak to any of my group aside from me, and to me only because I was a Grey Warden. How he knew that, I cannot be sure, but I do have a theory I cannot commit to writing. Even to me he showed no particular deference, nor did he seem concerned about the coming Blight. To the dwarves, particularly to the Legion of the Dead, every day is a Blight. They fight the darkspawn day in and day out, every year, every decade, every century, deep below the rest of the world’s notice, in the places where evil hides between Blights.

When I and my companions were able to clear the bridge completely of darkspawn, allowing his men to advance to the far end and for the first time in weeks stand before the gargantuan gates of Bownammar, I could see us rising in his esteem. His approval pleased me. One has only to see the Legion of the Dead in action, their grim fatalism, their wholehearted sacrifice, in order to feel the deepest respect for them. Less than a week (I presume) in this place has nearly killed me--this is where they choose to live out the rest of their lives.

The great Bownammar Gate can no longer be opened, but there was a tunnel off to the side of it that led to the remains of the great fortress. I see, now, why there is no reclaiming it.

This place is Blighted. Thoroughly fouled, beyond all hope of reclamation. The Blight is more here than the lingering scent of rot and the occasional darkspawn camp. It is a sick, dull, vile film that covers every surface. It is great, throbbing, fleshy swellings that hang like sickening fruit from walls and doorways. It is hard to breathe, hard to think.

We have no choice but to press on. First, though, we must rest, and we have found an intact little room with a door that can still be barred, where we may do so. 

I am in no state of mind or body to have an intimate romantic reunion with my love – what else can I call her, when she doggedly followed me into hell? – but I need her close at least, to drown out the reek of this place with the almost-forgotten scent of her hair. Not perfumed like a noblewoman’s, but earthy and alive in a way that reminds me there is more to this world than decay. Maker grant that she isn’t too proud to let me rest awhile with her in my arms.

  
  


Date Unknown

Location: The Dead Trenches  
Weather: Blighted  
Health: Fair  
Temper: Abject horror  
Events: An education in the unthinkable

<<First day they come, and catch everyone.>>

The words seemed to come from nowhere. The seven of us had been picking our way through Blight-choked corridors and chambers, killing all the darkspawn we found. We had long since stopped talking.

Then we heard the voice. A woman’s, flat and lifeless. Chanting the same childlike rhyme again and again. It seemed to have no origin, but simply to bleed through the air around us as though directly from the Fade.  
  
No one ever speaks of where the darkspawn horde comes from in such numbers. They started with seven Magisters, and we keep killing them by tens of thousands every Blight, and yet always, there are more.

<<Sixth day her screams we hear in our dreams.>>

I believe it was Oghren who first suggested that the faintly reverberating voice, though not Branka’s, might be a survivor of her house. It took at least three people to convince me that what I was hearing was not some relapse of my fever. They wanted me to find the source of the sound; all I wanted to do was flee from it.

In the end, we found her. Hespith of House Branka. Once a dwarf, now a ghoul, like Ruck. Her spine was so twisted that she had to peer up at a canted angle from under her foul hair. She spoke to herself rather than us, responding without acknowledging our reality. She believed we were a symptom of her madness, “a dream of strangers’ faces and open doors.”  
  
Tainted men do not turn into darkspawn; we know this. They become ghouls and eventually die. We have seen this again and again, and yet never asked ourselves how the ones we kill are replaced. It is all allegory, we tell ourselves; they are simply generated magically somehow by our sin.

<<Ninth day she grins, and devours her kin.>>

She had forced her ordeal into rhyme to make it fantasy. Her house taken by the darkspawn, the women force-fed corrupted flesh and darkspawn bile until they either died of the taint or were… changed by it. She tried to explain, but I pretended not to understand, told myself she was mad.

She was mad, but she was not wrong. We saw the monster of which she spoke. Laryn of House Branka, now a darkspawn broodmother. 

Laryn’s own family would not have recognized her now. A massive, bloated, tentacled horror, a parody of maternal bounty, fully-grown genlocks crawling into the world a dozen at a time from beneath her putrid folds of flesh, black-slimed with their mother’s blood.

We destroyed the beast, and a hundred of its children, but to what end? Knowledge cannot be slain, and some of it is too much to bear. 

I see it now, in every darkspawn I slay. I see who their mothers were. Hurlocks, with the height and build of men, and stout genlocks, with the bones of dwarves. Sometimes in the shadows: fast-moving shrieks with elven ears. And rarest of all: ogres, earth-shaking devastation with horns like those I’ve seen in Tevinter depictions of qunari.

We’ve been throwing men and women at the darkspawn since the dawn of history, ensuring the continuation of this horror. Part of me wishes I remained ignorant. But any knowledge, however horrific, can help pave the path to salvation.

Could we break the horde against a flood of incorruptible stone? Caridin created a legion of golems, but it was not enough - clearly it would take numbers on a scale not yet seen. How many? If there is a number that could truly overwhelm the horde, providing no replenishment for them even in defeat, what price could be too high? What could this world become, if we didn’t watch half of it burn every few centuries? 

At the start of this journey I believed that making new golems must not be possible, because if it were, Branka would have returned long ago with a new stone legion, a Paragon among Paragons. But now I suspect there may be another reason why she has not returned to Orzammar, even if she yet lives.

Hespith flung herself into a crevasse when Laryn died. <<I will not become what I have seen. Not Laryn, not Branka.>>

Laryn’s fate was not Branka’s. Hespith made it clear that Laryn’s monstrosity paled beside the Paragon’s. For it was Branka who knowingly inflicted this fate upon her own house.   
  
<<The Stone has punished me, dream-friend. I am dying of something worse than death. Betrayal.>>

Branka had been Hespith’s lover, and Branka had abandoned Hespith to the darkspawn, along with the rest of her house. For all Hespith’s madness, I recognized in her words the fire of truth: the way it burns through shame in one’s final hours, desperate to be seen. 

Hespith could not tell us why Branka let her house die. Perhaps she did not know.

If I find Branka, she will answer.


	8. Return to Sunlight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aedan wraps up his Orzammar business and travels eastward.

2 August

Location: Orzammar  
Weather: Subterranean  
Health: Fatigued  
Temper: Disoriented  
Events: A dead Paragon, a new King, a new quest.

“Your role in this election will long be remembered, Warden,” said a deshyr – a lord of the dwarven Assembly. I could tell from his tone that his words were meant with reverent gratitude for my part in placing a qualified dwarf on the throne, but as he spoke, I was quite literally standing bloody-bladed over the corpses of a prince, his royal guards, and half a dozen deshyrs. Choose your moment, my good sir.

Once again, I address things out of sequence. But it is this moment – this jarring incongruity, that sends me to my journal to write, and so it is there that I begin. Again I have become an indelible part of history, and again my mark was made in blood. In the past week I have killed not only a prince, but a Paragon. This part, I did not mention to the Assembly.

You’ll assume I mean Branka, unfortunate reader. What other Paragon is there? And surely I had cause to slay her, after what she did to her House. But as with all things in my life lately, it is more complicated than that.

Did you know, reader, that for a brief moment in history, the dwarves were winning the fight against the darkspawn? Taking back thaigs and putting the beasts on the run? My speculations were correct: a single legion of golems was enough to turn the tide against the teeming hordes. So what happened, then? Why did the darkspawn rally and undo all the progress the dwarves had made? Because the dwarves were betrayed by their own Paragon. 

At heart Caridin was a smith, not a warrior, and while in theory he understood the idea of sacrifice, once he was driven to pay a high price himself, something in him broke. 

I should have understood the nature of golems earlier, I suppose. Only the Maker can create life, and so a golem’s life must be taken from elsewhere. Each golem was once a living soul. They began with volunteers, but then a tyrannical king in Caridin’s time began sending prisoners and political enemies to the Anvil as well. I agree that using the Anvil as a punishment for political disagreement is unconscionable (though for some criminals, perhaps kinder than the death they deserve), but Caridin’s reaction was, to say the least, counterproductive.

Caridin – having volunteered himself to the Anvil by this time and clearly driven mad by the pain of his reforging – decided that the only solution to this abuse of authority was to keep the Anvil from everyone. There was no public hearing, no consensus; he simply took his toys and locked them away in the Dead Trenches, spending the next centuries of his cursed existence designing a gauntlet of traps meant to destroy anyone who came searching for him. His having made himself into a golem meant he was unable to destroy the Anvil himself, and he wanted to make absolutely certain that no one else could benefit from his knowledge. Because his guilt, you see, his personal decision of where we ought to draw the line in war, was apparently more important to him than the encroaching destruction of the entire world.

How do I know this? Because I had the honor of speaking to him myself. I had the choice of deciding which mad Paragon I was going to slay, and which would try to slay me. Only one of them was willing to forge a golem army to fight the Archdemon.

I am genuinely sorry for Caridin’s suffering. The poor man threw himself into the horrors of war with no real understanding of it. I can relate to his guilt; leadership means making nightmarish decisions at times, under great duress. As you know, unfortunate reader, there are several decisions of my own that haunt me, but you don’t see me locking myself away behind poison gas traps and intricate death machinery so that I may brood alone upon my wrongdoing for eternity.

Is volunteering for the Anvil any worse than signing oneself over to the Legion of the Dead? Is it any worse than what I and Daveth and Ser Jory endured – that horror of which I, the only survivor, can never write? The pledge to become a Grey Warden, a member of the Legion, or to become a golem is the same sort of voluntary self-immolation: the giving up of one’s very soul in the service of something greater. Caridin could not imagine that anyone could be strong enough to make this decision, despite the wall in his fortress inscribed with the names of those who did exactly that. And so he would make the decision for all of us.

That is the problem with Paragons. The dwarven rank and file call them gods until they begin to believe it.

Branka is just as mad, if not more so. She demanded her entire house sacrifice themselves to test Caridin’s traps, then threw them to the darkspawn when they refused, so that new broodmothers would create for her an endless supply of darkspawn fodder for trap-testing. But as mad and soulless as her methods were, her ultimate motive was removed entirely from self. Her personal feelings did not enter into her decisions, only her obsession with the cold hard fact that her people needed the golems in order to prevent their own extinction. 

Golems will help more than just the dwarves, now that Branka is back at work unlocking the Anvil’s secrets.

We left Branka there. What she has become after two years in the Deep Roads is not fit for dwarven society; even Oghren has finally washed his hands of her. But she was at least willing to do us the favor of forging a crown for us. She told us we could give it as her gift to whichever idiot we chose. As much as I detest her, she and I are in agreement that these political games mean nothing compared to the fight against the darkspawn.

She and I have something crucial in common: we both have seen the darkspawn in their lair, seen what they do to everything they touch, seen the intricate wonders that they carelessly foul and trample and leave to decay out of reach of memory. We know that no ethics, no progress, no beauty, no knowledge can survive such an endless onslaught of insatiable destruction. Knowing that, we know that there is nothing so precious that it cannot be dispensed with if it will win the fight.

Wynne disagrees with me. I’ve done terrible damage to our relationship by allowing the making of golems to continue, I can see that. I only hope she will understand in time. The bond I formed with Shale during our time in the Deep Roads has also been badly fractured, but for a different reason. The golem cares nothing for the morality of the Anvil itself; it only cares that I came back from a meeting with its Maker only to report that I’d had to slay him. 

Shale was seriously considering abandoning my company altogether when it heard this news, but persuasion has always been one of my strongest points. I explained my reasons for slaying the Paragon, told the golem everything I had learned from Caridin about its making and history, and agreed to go back into the Deep Roads – something I’d have sworn a mere hour before that I would never do – in order to see if it could find some trace of its past as a fleshy creature. I let Shale see the tracing I made of the list of volunteers, and while it did not trust me enough to tell me what on the list triggered its memory, it did tell me that it had an idea of where it might begin to look for answers. I suppose I owe it that much, after its tireless help in the Deep Roads and the shoddy repayment I gave it (not knowing for certain at the time, to be fair, that Shale was in fact a person and not merely a convincing inanimate facsimile thereof).

Oghren, in the meantime, with his marriage officially a shambles, is eager to accompany us further in our quest. I can’t say that he has grown on me in particular, but I am learning a great deal from him about the dwarven berserker discipline, and how to harness my battle rage so that it can be an asset rather than a liability. Wynne likes him too, oddly enough; they endlessly talk about the finer points of ale, and I think she actually enjoys his lewd comments – perhaps a welcome rarity at her age. I suppose I shall let him tag along, but I swear to the Maker, if he leers at Morrigan one more time I’m going to demonstrate to him just exactly how deep Fereldan battle-rage runs.

15 August

Location: Hinterlands  
Weather: Hot and dry  
Health: Good  
Temper: Weary but resolute  
Events: A golem’s revelation, revisiting old “victories”

Our time in the Deep Roads has left its marks on all of us. None of us who went down there will ever be the same, even now that we have once again tasted the sweetness of fresh air and the brightness of the sun. I’ve lost track of the cost of this expedition, and like that cursed Paragon herself, the very cost has made me more stubborn, more single-minded, less able to let go. But our last foray into the Deep Roads brought peace to someone, at least.

Cadash Thaig is strangely beautiful, less corrupted than many, though hard to find. It has enough exposure to indirect sunlight and fresh air that the darkspawn do not linger there, and so some green plants even grow, trailing over walls and thickening the stagnant water. 

After some time exploring the place, Shale began to remember being a dwarf there, a woman. She (for I must say “she” now) feels no attachment to her former identity -- seems perhaps even embarrassed by it -- but all the same, the experience changed something in her. Something changed in my respect for her as well, for we discovered via a monument at the site that she was one of the original dwarves to volunteer her life for the cause. She clearly has no regrets, which makes Caridin and Wynne’s melodrama about the whole thing all the more baffling.

Speaking of sacrifices, before leaving Orzammar I had a brief conversation with Kardol, the commander we met from the Legion of the Dead. I was surprised to find him outside the Deep Roads, but he had come specifically to congratulate me on managing to put a king on the throne of Orzammar and return the city to something resembling order. Testing his apparent respect for me, I challenged him to show the world what the Legion of the Dead could do by joining the fight on the surface… and I believe I may actually have convinced him. Time will tell, I suppose.

Oghren is officially part of our number now, and we lost neither Shale nor Wynne despite their recent objections to my leadership decisions. Now, counting Bricks, we are ten. Sweet Andraste. It seems only yesterday that I had Alistair and Morrigan and my dog against all the world. Now I have nine stalwart companions, plus Kinloch Hold’s templars and an army of golems readying themselves for battle at my command.

Still, it isn’t quite enough to end a Blight. Not yet.

On another note entirely… <strike> I wonder</strike>

<strike>I may have</strike> <strike></strike>

A strange thing happened not long after we left Orzammar. I hesitate even to write of it, but it will have repercussions, no doubt. 

I woke one night, and had trouble falling back asleep. I left my tent and found Zevran awake by the fire. He was not keeping watch; we all generally rely on Bricks to sound the alarm if needed. The elf was simply staring into the flames. I joined him, and we sat together for a while in silence.

I don’t know what happened, exactly. Why I rested my hand upon his back, why the feel of his ribs through his thin shirt made me pull him closer, why I let him kiss me, why I took him by the wrist and pulled him back to my tent. <strike>I have never</strike> There was something left over from our time in the Deep Roads, something I didn’t have words for, something that had to be expressed. That was all. We haven’t spoken of it <strike>very much</strike> since, but he has become transparently devoted to me in a way that I feel sure everyone must notice.

Anyhow, we’ve just finished a circuit around Lake Calenhad. Since I was heading back to Kinloch Hold anyhow, I agreed to accompany Oghren to a tavern on the shore of the lake nearby where Felsi, an old “friend” of his works. My task was to convince this acid-tongued little she-dwarf that Oghren had changed his ways and become a great hero. I didn’t _exactly_ lie. He did slaughter countless darkspawn in the Deep Roads, and he did have a hand in choosing the new king of Orzammar, and he does plan to face an Archdemon. He’s still a drunken bastard, but I may have neglected to mention that. 

When I learned from Felsi that Oghren once had gotten drunk and challenged a roast nug to a wrestling match at her father’s funeral, I nearly walked away from the enterprise. I value the blood that Oghren has shed beside me, but surely there must be some limits to what I should expect the others in his life to forgive. Luckily, the woman seems to carry an inexplicable torch for him, and so Oghren left the tavern with the certainty that she will be waiting with bated breath for him to defeat the Blight and return to her.

After that was over with, I stopped at the Circle to check in on the templars’ readiness for war. To my surprise, those considered fit to fight have already been sent out into the field to engage the darkspawn. Knight-Commander Greagoir says that once the Blight is defeated, he will call in Senior Enchanters from Antiva and Orlais to rebuild the Circle. I asked him about Dagna, the dwarven smith’s little redheaded daughter who was planning to help with the rebuilding. Unfortunately, no one has seen her. I sincerely hope the girl at least thought to find some bodyguards to accompany her before setting off.

I checked in on Cullen Rutherford, the curly-haired young templar who had advised us to annul the Circle. I found him tidying up the half-ruined library, bleakly resentful that he wasn’t sent with the others to fight. When I asked Greagoir why, he opined that the young man should have some time off after his particularly traumatic experience. I suggested to Greagoir that the kindest thing he could do would be to send the young man as far from this place as possible. Someone with such a demonstrably ironclad will is surely an asset to the order, but asking him to live out his days trapped in the very place that nearly broke him seems unnecessarily cruel.

Once our business was finished at the Circle we visited Redcliffe Castle, only to find that Arl Eamon’s condition is exactly the same as it was when we left. His body continues to function, but his mind, it seems, is gone. He shows no awareness of his surroundings. His knights are still on some foolish quest to cure him with Andraste’s ashes, thanks to recent and supposedly legitimate findings by the famous Chantry scholar Genitivi in Denerim. I may try to find him and have a word with him, since we are on our way to Denerim anyhow.

Maker’s balls, I didn’t even write of that yet. I’m so tired, unfortunate reader. 

When a dozen assassins appeared among the trees as though by magic three days ago, at first I assumed that Zevran had been in contact with his former brethren and put them back on our scent. Once we killed all the lackeys, the leader--with my blade to his throat for encouragement--admitted that he was there for “the little redheaded girl.” My urge to return immediately to the camp and murder Zevran abated considerably. It seems we are a traveling party of assassin-bait.

Even Leliana was shocked; she, too, had assumed they were after me. But when it became clear she was the target, she knew exactly why. 

Her former bardmaster (and, I infer, lover) Marjolaine among other things sold Orlesian secrets to other nations. When Leliana caught her at it, Marjolaine pretended to repent but then altered documents to make Leliana look the traitor. Leliana was captured and tortured by the Orlesian government, but eventually escaped to the safety of Ferelden’s Chantry. As far as she knew until the forest ambush, that was the end of it. But apparently Marjolaine kept tabs all these years, and Leliana’s emergence from the Chantry in Lothering newly armed and cutting a bloody swath across Ferelden in the company of assassins and apostates and whatnot apparently alarmed her former mentor enough that she has decided to tie up loose ends.

I lied and told the man I would let him go in exchange for the address of Marjolaine’s last known headquarters – which turn out to be right here in Ferelden, in Denerim. We’ll deal with her later, but mark my words, we will deal with her, just as I dealt with him. Marjolaine is not the only one who prefers her ends tied up neatly.

23 August

Location: Brecilian Forest  
Weather: Misty and temperate  
Health: Good  
Temper: Wary  
Events: First contact with potential new allies

Proceeding from the southern shore of Lake Calenhad to the city of Denerim means there is no avoiding a trek through the edge of the Brecilian Forest. I haven’t a scrap of magical talent--unless my Warden abilities qualify as some form of dark magic--and yet after enough exposure to such things, I believe any man can begin to develop a sense for when the Veil is thin. Here in the Brecilian Forest, a long history of terror and violence has worn that all-important bastion of mortal sanity to tatters. 

There is a constant feeling of being watched here, and a peculiar quality to the sounds. The faintest murmur reverberates, and the echoes are returned not quite the same in some undefinable way. It is as though we are adjacent some other world where everything is happening a half-second later and darker, and we are close enough to that world to eavesdrop upon it. Most of us have become silent and subdued on this leg of the journey, even the normally chatty Zevran. Sten seems most uncomfortable of all. The Qunari are at a decided disadvantage when it comes to matters of magic; Sten’s hostility thinly disguises his visceral terror of the one thing in this world that even the Qunari cannot delude themselves that they control.

After several days of navigating this strangely-chill wilderness – barely tepid even now at the tail end of summer – we stumbled onto the proverbial doorstep of a Dalish clan. I was not expecting that any of the clans would have remained this far south with rumor of a Blight, nor was I particularly elated to encounter them, for although we Wardens do have treaties obligating the Dalish to aid us, nothing I have heard about the elves suggested that they would let us live long enough to present documentation. 

A pair of their savagely-tattooed archers challenged us at arrow-point; I credit my many years of training in the art of diplomacy for the fact that instead of ending up a feathered pincushion, I and my party were briskly escorted to meet with their “Keeper,” an elder male named Zathrian.

At the sight of the Keeper, Bricks raised his hackles and snarled in a way he hadn’t at the younger hunters. Zathrian was none too pleased to see a dog, either, saying something cryptic about “enough trouble with such beasts.” I understand the comment now, though I didn’t at the time. 

Given Zathrian’s current situation, I can forgive his distaste for my hound, but I am still uncertain why Bricks took such a dislike to the elf before Zathrian had even noticed him. I’ve become rather fluent in Mabari, or in “Bricks” at least. Zathrian is no demon; this higher-pitched snarl was a more mundane warning, but I consider myself well-warned nonetheless. I trust my hound’s judgment; he often perceives body language too subtle for even my trained eye or catches scents that, to his sensitive nose, tell explicit tales of violence or deceit.

After Zathrian’s initial discomfort passed he was more polite than I expected, though there was a tense undercurrent to his words that revealed our conversation for the unhappy necessity it was. As soon as I mentioned that I was a Grey Warden, Zathrian brought up the treaties, though I had yet to mention them. It has been centuries since the last Blight; I suppose his role of “Keeper” of ancient lore is more than nominal if he has such history on the tip of his tongue. He regrets, however, that Clan Mishellan is currently in no position to help themselves, let alone the Grey Wardens. 

He explained that the other Dalish clans in the area fled north as soon as they heard rumors of Blight, but that Mishellan remains here because they are too ill too move. There are werewolves in the forest, and apparently the curse has begun to spread through his clan, causing suffering, death, and in some cases, eventual transformation into a mindless beast. His recommendation was that we seek allies elsewhere.

To the Void with that, I say. If I did not give up on potential allies when told they were possessed by demons or embroiled in a bloody stalemate over a throne, I do not believe I shall turn around at talk of werewolves, particularly given that Highever became a teyrnir in the first place because one of my ancestors triumphed over just such a plague.

According to Cousland family legends, werewolf curses begin when a rage demon possesses a wolf. Its bite then transforms everything it touches, creating a sort of epidemic. Zathrian was pleased that I knew so much of these matters; he believes that if I can find and slay Witherfang, the possessed wolf who originated this regional curse, I will be able to free all the living who have already been afflicted.

Forgive me if it sounds cynical, unfortunate reader, but I learned first-hand at the Circle and in Redcliffe Village that those who are rescued from certain torment and death make loyal allies to the one who saved them. I shall of course look into the matter more thoroughly before jumping in, but if these people’s suffering can be cured with a simple wolf-hunt, then a seasoned warrior and the last surviving descendant of Teyrn Mather Cousland is quite possibly the most qualified person alive to cure them.


	9. Nature of the Beast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> May the Dread Wolf take you.

24 August

Location: Brecilian Forest  
Weather: Cloudy and warm  
Health: Good  
Temper: Frustrated  
Events: Addressed by werewolves, assaulted by trees.

It’s interesting to me that Keeper Zathrian failed to mention that these werewolves could speak. 

As much as I love a good slaughter, if my enemy has the gift of language I prefer to parley before resorting to blades, and it seems that at least some of the werewolves agree. Not long after we left the Dalish camp, the leader of the local werewolves, who calls himself Swiftrunner, accosted my small scouting group and had a word with us. His primary purpose was to make threats to the Dalish, whose lackey he assumed I was, and he mentioned Zathrian by name. Interesting. He tried to frighten my group back to the camp, but when I refused to either attack or retreat, he and his companions loped off into the forest. Even more interesting.

Not all of the werewolves were so opposed to bloodshed; small packs of them attacked us without a word on several occasions, but humans and dwarves have done as much, have they not? I cannot be certain if the werewolves vary in sapience, or simply in attitude. Bricks seems to take a special pleasure in fighting them. Perhaps it’s true that Mabari descend from the wolves who fought beside the great hero Dane, or perhaps he simply enjoys facing foes who better understand the nuances of his battle cries.

Deeper in the forest, we found a werewolf who had once been one of the Dalish, a woman named Danyla who was now wandering the woods in terrible pain. Unable to bear the curse, she asked that I put her out of her misery. 

Increasingly baffled by the contrast between Zathrian’s tales and what I was seeing (he’d told Danyla’s husband Athras she was dead, for one), I told her I would do as she asked if she could help me understand what was happening. Speaking was difficult for her, so I did not insist upon a lengthy interrogation. I did learn, however, that the werewolves dwell in the center of the forest and that they are “no longer” mindless beasts (her words). Perhaps they were savage once, but something has changed. That was all I could get from her before I felt obligated to give her the clean death she asked for. Leliana had to turn away; I often wonder how she remains so sensitive after the life she has lived.

I cannot reason out why Zathrian is so hostile to any curiosity about the werewolves, any attempt to discover nuance or mitigate the inherent violence of the situation. Is it because of the Dalish superstition about their wolf-god Fen’Harel, who takes on a sort of demonic role in their mythology? I’m too unfamiliar with their culture to understand if Zathrian is acting strangely, or if Dalish mores are strange to me in general.

In addition to the werewolves, there are small numbers of darkspawn encroaching on the forest, including a surprising number of ogres. At the moment, though, my greatest antagonists are trees. Yes, you read that correctly. I do not only mean that without roads or manmade landmarks they are disorienting and hindering, though I assure you they are. In one area of the forest in particular, for example, we found ourselves retracing our steps back along a certain path no matter how determinedly we attempted to progress along it. Morrigan was certain that magic was at work in that case.

But the trees’ resistance is not limited to the passive sort. “Wild sylvans,” I am told, is the official term for trees possessed by demons. Whatever one chooses to call them, they have the ability to thrust their roots up from the ground an astonishing distance away from their main trunk and wrap them around you, immobilizing you and slowly crushing you. In our first battle with a sylvan, one of them nabbed poor unarmored Morrigan before she had a chance to cast a single spell. When it at last let go of her, she fell to the ground limp as a doll, blood streaming from every orifice. 

I thought she was dead, and we had not brought Wynne with us to raise her (her distant attitude toward me since Orzammar makes me hesitant to bring her into danger). Once the tree was felled, I rushed to Morrigan and found her still breathing; we were able to do enough with potions and poultices to get her back to camp. By the Maker, may I never again know the feeling of that indomitable woman lying broken in my arms.)

Sylvans can be defeated if one takes them by surprise, but it is rather difficult to ambush something that looks like every damned tree in the forest. Perhaps motivated by her near-death experience, Morrigan has been incredibly useful in identifying them at a distance so that we can prepare.

Just when I thought we had sylvans figured out, we met the Grand Oak… or so he introduced himself. Yes, he spoke, in a rich rhyming baritone, so I shall refer to him as male despite the absurdity. There is no mistaking him for an ordinary tree, even at a distance. He has something very like a face, with which he was clearly watching us calmly and without rancor as we approached. On a hunch I greeted him, and a conversation… of sorts… ensued. He insists in speaking in rhyming couplets, tinged with an odd mix of profound insight and juvenile humor (he referred to himself as a poet-tree, to give one cringeworthy example).

He pities the other wild sylvans, but claims that the spirit who long ago came to inhabit his great oak made peace with its new home, and so he does not feel as trapped, blinded, and full of rage as the others who were similarly incarnated. He is now neither spirit nor tree, but something created from the harmony between them.  
  
He was able to tell us, in his stilted and eccentric way, that there is some causal connection between the werewolves and the powerful spirit who once watched over this entire forest. In his words, “The day she left is the day they came.” He also clarified why none of the Dalish hunters have had any luck locating Witherfang, the progenitor of the curse. The werewolf lair is allegedly protected by the forest itself, and those who are unwelcome are simply… redirected.

Morrigan’s gaze and mine found one another at that moment. We both knew exactly when and where we’d strayed too close to the lair. Ah, reader, that sly smile…

The oak implied that it could help us past the enchantments protecting the werewolf lair, but as with all spirits, it had a bargain to make with us first. We somehow must find, in all the Brecilian forest, a single stolen acorn. The Grand Oak claims the thief was a man, and not a squirrel, so that’s something at least. One can only hope that an acorn remarkable enough for a man to consider stealing must be the sort of thing a man would keep rather than, say, eat or use to grow a new oak tree. Even if so, the oak seems to have no idea where the man went, so I do not hold out much hope of earning the creature’s help. It seemed harmless enough at any rate, and it gave us some vital pieces to this puzzle, and so I left it in peace.

On our way back to camp to confer with the others, I mused aloud that the Grand Oak was the first possessed creature I’d seen that wasn’t madly trying to kill everything it saw. Morrigan contradicted me, but would not elaborate until we’re alone, at which point she informed me that her mother was just such a creature. She believes that her mother is _the _Flemeth of legend, preserved all these years by a desperate bargain she made with a spirit long ago. Flemeth is, in short, what the Chantry and the Circle would call an abomination… like Uldred, like Connor, like that little girl in Honnleath. And yet she not only spoke to me with reasonable coherence, but she also saved my life and ensured that I was fed and healed.

What makes the difference? The intent of the spirit who possesses, or the strength of the host who is possessed? Or both? I have no idea.

Back at camp, I spent some time with Alistair, and for once I think I made some progress toward earning his trust, for he talked to me of personal matters I won’t commit to writing. I suppose it balances out Wynne’s distance somewhat, but I cannot help but regret the loss of the warmth I used to feel from her. Maker, it feels like a lifetime ago that I met her at Ostagar, the wound of my mother’s loss still fresh, and spoke to her of the origin of the darkspawn. And though I do not remember it, I know that I rescued her in the Fade, and that she stood beside me there to fight our way out.

I cannot demand her forgiveness, even after all we’ve been through together. I must respect her right to change her mind about me, even if it is for the worse. I only pray that she has not, in her wisdom, seen something dreadful in me that I myself have missed.

26 August

Location: Brecilian Forest  
Weather: Summer is shirking its duty  
Health: Weak  
Temper: Demoralized  
Events: Conversations with werewolves, near disaster

We had been making tremendous progress in tracking down Witherfang, but now we are convalescing at the Dalish camp. We were not bitten by werewolves, thankfully; what nearly ended us was swifter, less violent, and all the more horrible for that.

I dislike having Morrigan around the Dalish this long. I have told her, not dishonestly, that I need her with me on my ventures into the forest because of her wilderness knowledge and fearsomeness in battle. Truth be told, I am also afraid to leave her with the clan, because given their inclination toward hostility and resentment, I feel our lives are a few ill-chosen words away from being forfeit at all times despite their veneer of hospitality. 

Wynne and Zevran have been ingratiating themselves via their respectful curiosity (gentle/scholarly and charming/zealous, respectively). Alistair has come across as endearingly awkward and helpless, enticing some of the clan’s elder women to fuss over him. Sten has at least kept his mouth shut. But Morrigan is contemptuous of everything, loves the sound of her own voice (ah, there she is not alone), and lacks the natural compassion that would silence most people who witnessed the clan’s suffering. And so I keep her within a stone’s throw of me at all times. Let her interpret it as infatuation if she likes; better for her to feel smug in her supposed power over me than know that I am watching her as I would a troublesome child.

Thank the Maker for it today, though. Thank the Maker I ignored her when she demanded a rest and complained that if I forced her to fight one more “raging arboreal abomination” she would hang herself from its branches. We did not, in fact, encounter any more sylvans--we may actually have slain them all. In fact, our outing was successful beyond our wildest hopes.

We found, once again, the peculiar spot in the heart of the forest that dulled our senses with mist and then sent us back out the way we came. Awareness of the enchantment was not enough to break it, and so we began to attempt to map the boundaries of this area, hoping for a weakness in the protection. We ended up more lost than ever, but as fate would have it we strayed so far off course that we entered an entirely unfamiliar area of the forest, one with subtle signs of human habitation. Morrigan carefully followed these signs, which led us to a camp where a ragged and malodorous old man was carrying on an animated conversation with no one, or himself, or perhaps some spirit only he could see.

I immediately began to approach, but Morrigan caught my wrist. She warned me that she sensed great power in the old man despite his madness. Armed with this information, I asked him if he happened to know a way to dispel the nearby enchantment. He said he did, and would be happy to help us if we’d be so kind as to kill a certain talking tree that had been pestering him.

Unfortunate reader, so elated was I to have something resembling a lead that I very nearly did exactly as he asked, until I remembered that the tree had also offered to help me, and I belatedly put two and two together. “Is this tree by any chance pestering you about an acorn?”

Indeed it was so. And thus I got drawn into a complicated game of questions and answers, and traded personal possessions back and forth according to the old man’s whimsical “rules” until I walked away with the acorn, which, by the way, looked exactly like any other acorn, if perhaps a bit on the large side. If the tree hadn’t been so elated to see it I’d have had no way of knowing I’d actually succeeded in my quest. And succeed we did! The grand oak gave us one of his own branches--he had plenty to spare--and claimed that it would “fool” the forest into thinking we were part of it.

So why are we at the Dalish camp, you may ask, rather than in the werewolves’ lair slaughtering Witherfang? Because I decided to take a shortcut back to the center of the forest.

Perhaps a quarter hour’s walk from the grand oak, we found an abandoned campsite. It had just the right number of clean and ready bedrolls, and the warmth of its unattended fire snared us, pulling us in from the unseasonable chill. I was overtaken by a sudden weariness, but an unattended fire in these woods was suspect, to say the least. My mistake was in deciding to investigate the campsite itself for clues rather than wander off to look for whoever (surely nearby?) had started the fire. The closer I got the the camp, the more irresistible its warmth and comfort. The last thing I heard before drowsiness overtook me was Morrigan’s slightly slurred assertion that something was very wrong.

According to Morrigan, Bricks followed me into the camp, yawned and curled up by the fire, and Leliana sank onto a cot as though her bones had turned to water. Morrigan says she approached and knelt by my bedroll with the intent to wake me, but found herself lying down next to me instead. She found the sensation so comforting that she fell asleep almost immediately.

(Why did she admit that it comforted her to have me near? It wasn’t necessary to the story.) 

Not long after drifting off, she claims, she became conscious of a dreadful chill, as though she had fallen asleep next to a portal that led directly to the spine of the Frostbacks. By sheer force of will she woke herself--and saw a terrible, ancient forest shade feeding on us all, draining our senseless bodies of life essence. 

Alone and already weakened, Morrigan fought the creature to the death. Its power would have been formidable even had the three of us assisted her; Morrigan relates that at one moment during the fight she was forced to cast an encasing and paralyzing spell (one she usually saves for our most fearsome enemies) directly on herself simply to create time to mentally prepare the use of her other spells while the shade battered fecklessly at her trapped form. “If I live to be as ancient and wizened as my mother,” she told me in the course of spinning the tale, “even then I believe I shall occasionally relive that moment in my nightmares.”

I cannot doubt her story, for slaying the shade broke the spell. We all woke, and where there had once been a clean and inviting camp there was now a desolate clearing littered with dozens of skeletons, a few kicked apart by our (and others’) heedless trudging... the rest positioned peacefully as though in sleep. 

29 August

Location: Brecilian Forest   
Weather: Sultry  
Health: Good  
Temper: Bitter  
Events: Fen’Harel laughs.

At the very edge of the Dalish camp sits a statue of Fen’Harel, the “Dread Wolf.” Unlike the other statues of their gods, Fen’Harel is not allowed within the camp itself, and his idol is placed facing away. Fen’Harel, you see, is the elves’ fearsome trickster god. Their everyday colloquial expressions are full of their fear of the wolf’s malicious intent. “May the Dread Wolf never catch your scent.” “Dread Wolf take you!” And so on.

Clan Mishellan’s storyteller never warmed to me well enough to speak to me, so it was a child who told me her garbled version of the legend of the great war between the Creator gods and the evil Forgotten Ones. It is said that both sets of gods trusted Fen’Harel, and so they called a temporary truce on his advice and retreated to their separate realms. He then promptly locked the doors behind them, cutting the elves off from access to their Creators for all eternity. This, the Dalish say, is why Tevinter was able to overrun their vast and glorious civilization – because thanks to the Dread Wolf, they could no longer call upon the powers of their gods.

The Mishellan clan’s statue of Fen’Harel still sits at the edge of the camp where I first saw him, but today his flanks are splashed red. Ah, children of fallen Arlathan, turn the wolf’s gaze away all you like, but he is not done with you yet, it seems. He comes, this time, in the guise of a Grey Warden.

As it turns out, the great spirit of the Brecilian forest never left. Long ago, the Mishellan Keeper Zathrian, driven mad by the torture and deaths of his two children at the hands of humans, used blood magic to force this spirit to possess a living wolf. Thus Zathrian himself created the creature known as Witherfang.

This story was told to us by the Lady of the Forest herself, a gentle spirit who, despite her imprisonment inside a mad beast, eventually regained her individual will. Since then she has tirelessly been trying to restore the werewolves’ human side and calm their savage natures, giving them names and purpose, in hopes that one day they might be cured and restored – as might she. The entire forest has been robbed of its very soul for generations because one man – rendered immortal by the very ritual that doomed the forest -- could not bear the loss of his family.

I feel for him; how could I not? I whose brother’s bones rot somewhere at Ostagar, a man who saw the deaths of his mother, father, nephew and sister-in-law all in one blood-soaked night. If I had the chance for revenge on Howe, I would take it, and I would not feel obligated to make his end quick or honorable. But would I set loose a curse that doomed an entire tribe of humans for generations, and refuse to end that curse even when my own people were suffering and dying? I would not. There are limits to what anger might justify.

Once I fully understood the depths of Zathrian’s monomania -- the endless lust this immortal being had for the suffering of not just those specific humans who harmed his kin but their descendants in perpetuity – I realized that there could be no reasoning with such fathomless hatred. Our only chance at ending the curse was to force his hand by putting his own survival at stake.

I led the Lady and her werewolves directly to the Dalish camp. Despite my presence, the hunters guarding the camp loosed arrows at our group; the werewolves were forced to slay them just to reach Zathrian. Once they did, the Keeper called a halt to the fighting, and for a moment I thought my stratagem might have worked. The Lady confronted him, begged to be released from her feral prison so that the werewolf curse might be ended and so that both the humans and the Dalish might be saved.

Zathrian refused.

My escort lent the werewolves no legitimacy in his eyes, but only confirmed his belief that all humans, even Grey Wardens, were honorless and unworthy of trust.

“You will suffer as I have suffered!” he declared, and at that there was no stopping Swiftrunner, who had already held his bestial rage in check for far too long. He attacked Zathrian. 

I thought surely the Dalish, having at last heard the truth, would accept the execution of their crazed leader and try to find some other way of achieving peace, but to my horror the entire clan – craftsmen and storytellers and children \-- chose to leap to their Keeper’s defense with everything they had, despite having just heard him throw their lives away.

It was a disaster. The slaughter only ended when every last able-bodied elf had been destroyed. All that remains of Clan Mishellan are those who were so ill with the werewolf curse that they could not rise from their cots to defend the Keeper. The werewolves tend to them now with surprising care, seeing them as brothers and sisters in misfortune. The treaty compelling the Dalish to help us against the Blight is now utterly useless, as the last Dalish clan in Ferelden has been wiped out to the last man.

With Zathrian dead, so is all hope of ending the curse. But the heartbroken werewolves are determined to make the most of the existence that remains to them, now that they have no choice. They have sworn to serve me, for the way I risked myself to help them, and if they can be controlled and directed they may prove very useful against the darkspawn. If nothing else, they are not particularly precious about their lives or the idea of returning to some idyllic imagined existence. Their ferocity may serve the cause well.

But I cannot count it a victory. Even more so than the misery at the Circle and Redcliffe, this failure haunts me. The bulk of the slaughter and violence in those places had already been set into motion before I even arrived. My intervention in this situation made it worse in the only way it might have been made worse. Without my arrival, Zathrian would still be unable to find Witherfang, and perhaps if the clan had survived the Blight, those not yet turned would have escaped to safer territory.

But I have played the Dread Wolf on a smaller scale, earning the elves’ trust and then bringing about their doom. How does a man live with this? The weight of my past decisions’ consequences was already heavy enough make my bones ache, and that was when I could stand by every choice I made as the best of the available options.

This, though? This was unambiguously a mistake. This was my error in judgment. I should have known better than to back Zathrian into a corner. Of course he would try to fight his way out. Am I losing my judgment? Am I too weary to continue this fight? We’ve barely begun, and I am losing faith in myself, but I cannot let the others see.

Zevran was more subdued than usual after the battle. I spoke with him, and for the first time, he told me of his mother, who had been one of the Dalish herself. She was forced into prostitution when her Antivan city-elf lover abandoned her, and she died when Zevran was small, but she left an old pair of her gloves that had always fascinated him. 

I expected Zevran to be angrier at me about what happened to this clan, but while he was certainly not pleased, he said he had lost his boyish illusions about the Dalish long ago. Still, I now felt dreadful on a personal level on top of my regrets as a leader and commander, especially after so recklessly using Zevran for physical comfort when I know our relationship can go nowhere so long as Morrigan lays claim to me. 

During my attempt to put the camp in order and to respectfully burn their dead, I found a lone pair of pristine Dalish-crafted gloves, unused at their crafter’s wagon, that seemed a perfect fit for Zevran. I presented them to him as an offering. A ghoulish gesture, I realize – the conqueror looting the fallen -- but the gloves would have rotted away unworn otherwise, and they were exquisite in make. Zevran was the only one of our company who had even the slightest right to them. He understood the gesture for what it was, and it even seemed to give him a small measure of peace.

Would that there were a gift that could restore mine.


	10. Heart of Ferelden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aedan explores some Grey Warden history and furtively raises hell in the great city of Denerim.

2 Kingsway

Location: Wilderness of South Reach  
Events: Midnight attack

I saw the Archdemon in a dream. And it saw me. 

Its cold gaze, a window to the very heart of the Blight, turned upon me and lingered, knowing. Upon waking, I learned that Alistair had the same dream. No sooner had we decided it was a shared portent than a small army of darkspawn attacked our camp.

It was the first time the sanctity of our camp had been violated, and so it was the first time I had seen us all fighting in one place: Alistair, Morrigan, Leliana, Sten, Wynne, Zevran, Shale, Oghren, even Bricks. I was too shaken by the nightmare to command well, but everyone seemed to know their place. They’ve fallen into patterns from working and socializing together these past months. Wynne and Leliana gravitate toward protecting Alistair; Morrigan, Sten, and Zevran rally to me, while Shale, Oghren and Bricks add the perfect quantity of chaos, unpredictable beasts that they are.

We defeated the darkspawn intruders, and none of us were seriously injured. Morrigan found the interruption irritating at best; Zevran suggested that the Archdemon needed to be taught how to properly stage an assassination. Sten immediately proposed ways to make the camp more secure. Most everyone is asleep again, now.

Alistair and I lie awake. I write to calm my mind; he attempts his old templar meditations. But I don’t think either of us will rest well tonight.

11 Kingsway

Location: Coastlands wilderness  
Weather: Driving rain  
Health: Fine  
Temper: Calm and detached  
Events: Travel through central Ferelden

I have made contact with a fellow named Levi Dryden, who has apparently been searching for Alistair and myself since Ostagar. Not to assassinate us, even! 

It seems that Levi once made a promise to Duncan, my doomed recruiter, to lead him to a lost Grey Warden stronghold from the Storm Age. I’m keen to investigate. Alistair and I don’t even know how to perform the Joining ritual should we want to induct new Wardens. I am eager to see what, if anything, we can learn there about the order and its history that may be of use to us in both of our current battles (against the Blight, and against Loghain).

On our way to the mountains at the northern border of Ferelden where the keep is supposedly located, we’ve had to travel a somewhat serpentine path through the Bannorn, avoiding significant settlements and keeping to the wilds or sparsely populated rural areas. This means that for quite a few days now, our most pressing concerns have been wildlife. The wolves and bears of Ferelden have been driven from their usual hunting grounds by darkspawn, it seems. Even those animals not blighted are mad with hunger, attacking anything that moves.

At one point our path narrowed so that we had no choice but to work our way through an area littered with wolf-traps. Zevran, adept at spotting such things, did his best to disarm them one by one while the rest of us defended ourselves from a pack of wolves who were apparently equally adept at spotting traps, if not at disarming them.

When the ensuing savage battle was over, all of us covered in blood and hair and wolf-drool, there was a trap Zevran had not yet sprung. This trap had actually caught a wan and scrawny specimen (of theirs, not ours, I should specify). On closer examination, the poor beast appeared to have at least a bit of dog running through its veins, not Mabari but some common cur with a patchy coat that had left traces in its feral offspring. This perhaps explained the creature’s lack of cunning. Zevran was on the verge of mercifully slitting the thing’s throat when it licked his hand and gave him pleading eyes.

“The poor thing likes you,” I said. “Why not try feeding it and letting it go? If it attacks, we finish it. If it runs away, we let it free. What do you say?”

Reader, that stupid cur has followed Zevran all the way to the North Road. She’s a bitch – only in the literal sense – and he has given her a name: Rinna. She already seems to have a bit more meat on her bones, and I’m slightly ashamed of how much that warms my heart. We Fereldans have always been kinder to dogs than to men.

19 Kingsway

Location: Camp off the North Road  
Weather: Cloudy and cool  
Health: Fine  
Temper: Pensive  
Events: Another chapter in my family history.

We found the old Warden fortress, Soldier’s Peak, and naturally it was a demon-infested nightmare. Thrice is indeed the charm, for this time I was not daunted in the slightest.   
  
The Veil was so thin there that we could clearly hear and sometimes even see the echoes of past arguments, battles, atrocities. Between that and the journals and documents lying about, we were able to piece together a tale that had been lost to history for nearly two hundred years, thanks to a bloody civil war not unlike the one Fereldan is hurtling toward now. 

It turns out that Sophia Dryden, Levi’s ancestor, had been in line for the throne of Ferelden, and was banished to the Grey Wardens when the nobility decided that her young cousin Arland Theirin would be easier to manipulate. When King Arland turned out to be a tyrant and a madman, Dryden tried to put an end to his rule, using the Wardens as her army. 

Eventually she and her people were driven back and cornered in the Wardens’ fortress at Soldier’s Peak. In desperation she and a mage named Avernus turned to blood magic, tearing the Veil in the process. The demons they unleashed devoured Wardens and King’s men alike, and ever since then the place has been a haunted ruin.

Both she and Avernus, however, were still there, in a manner of speaking.

I encountered her in her office, clad in Warden-Commander armor. I might have mistaken her for a blighted but living Warden if not for the way Bricks began to growl. That particular low, warning growl of his: body stiff, whites of his eyes showing, says to me as clearly as if in the common tongue: _DEMON_. And so I slew her by way of greeting. Only after a search of her office did I piece together that I had destroyed the body of Sophia Dryden herself, thereby banishing the demon that had long been inhabiting it.

That we were able to redeem Soldier’s Peak at all I owe to the wretched Avernus, who was still alive, thanks to blood magic and Maker knows what else. Trapped for two centuries as the only human in that keep, keeping the demons (“Sophia” included) at bay by the skin of his teeth. He has done ungodly things to his fellow Wardens in pursuit of knowledge that might save him. Once fresh help arrived, he managed to repair the Veil while we fought off the angry demons that his efforts caused to pour through it.

In addition to being instrumental in reclaiming the Keep, at the moment Avernus is the only source I have for knowledge about the strange powers that Darkspawn blood gives to Wardens. He has sworn that he will only continue his research within proper ethical bounds now that he is not besieged in a demon-infested keep, and so I have allowed him to continue. I may live to regret my choice, but then again, none of us may live at all. It seems a poor time to be delicate about ethics. Better we should later be forced to reform a civilization gone wicked than have no civilization left to reform.

Learning from Avernus about the Dryden rebellion was particularly interesting; his memories of it were surprisingly fresh. It seems that the Couslands almost rebelled along with Dryden, but then King Arland had teyrn Phelan Cousland (missing from the family histories I learned as a boy!) executed and his head presented on a platter at a banquet with an apple in his mouth. According to Avernus, King Arland then slaughtered his way through my family until the only ones left were those willing to fall in line.

It is disheartening to look at the greater arc of my family’s history. The Couslands threw off the shackles of Amaranthine, stood against Calenhad Theirin himself to keep Highever free, but accepted defeat gracefully. They then singlehandedly defeated a plague of werewolves, resisted Theirin rule once again when a madman took the throne, survived that madman’s vengeful wrath to remain the second most powerful family in Ferelden, aided the rebellion that drove Orlesian invaders from our lands and helped put a deserving Theirin back on the throne – only to be exterminated in one night by the likes of Arl Rendon Howe.

But that is all in the past now. Some of it is achingly _recent_ history, but history nonetheless. I am a Grey Warden now. I am the end of the Cousland story, and if I can lead an army against this Blight, my family can exit history in the same way that it entered: with stubborn courage in the face of overwhelming odds.

Our next step is to infiltrate Denerim. We are relatively near the city now, and we may as well pay a visit to this Brother Genitivi who was so certain that the miraculous panacea of Andraste’s Ashes was more than just a myth. Perhaps we can get more recent news about Teyrn Loghain’s plans if we listen at taverns near his seat of power. Obviously extreme caution will be necessary, but both Zevran and Leliana have good advice on how to move about unseen through various back alleys and little-known passages.

Perhaps by the time we are finished in Denerim, Levi and his family will have been able to get the Keep into some sort of order. It is a fine location for a Grey Warden stronghold, should Alistair and I ever have the chance to do as we hoped and rebuild the order.

But daylight fades, and that is a matter for tomorrow. For the moment, I think I may take Morrigan up on her offer of a return visit.

22 Kingsway

Location: Denerim  
Weather: Overcast  
Health: Acceptable  
Temper: Tense  
Events: Nothing but bad news.

Before yesterday I hadn’t set foot in Denerim in ten years, not since the time I spent the summer there with Father learning about the Landsmeet and getting to know the attending nobles. Let’s call it what it was: a bride-shopping expedition. It didn’t go as Father had hoped.

I expected to find the place unrecognizably changed, but to my surprise I could still find my way around the market from memory, as though no time had passed. I could swear I even recognized some of the merchants. Hooded as I was, with my hair and new beard powdered gray, I doubt any of them recognized me. Morrigan has wasted no opportunity to mock me, calling me “old man” and “Uncle” and asking if I need to rest my aching bones.

If any of our companions are aware that Morrigan and I have become intimate, they’ve been kind enough to say nothing about it, with one peculiar exception. I overheard a conversation between Sten and Morrigan in which he asked her what she intended. Not the way a father asks a man who is courting his daughter, but more the way a guard asks a stranger he has caught skulking about his lord’s treasury in the dead of night. Morrigan attempted to flirtatiously deflect the question, but Sten was not amused. He said, “I know a viper when I see one.”

That he took the issue up with her and not with me is interesting. It seems that the peculiar deference he has begun to show me extends to outright protectiveness. I wish I knew more about his culture and could better interpret his behavior. The way he thinks is so alien to me that he is difficult to predict. I wonder if there are books on the Qun here in Denerim? Do I dare dart into Wonders of Thedas for even a moment?

I should make haste away from here, truth be told. My goal was to gather news and find Brother Genitivi. The latter I failed at decisively and excitingly; the former I succeeded at miserably.

The news is that due to a conveniently-timed rash of deaths in the Kendells family, Rendon Howe is the new Arl of Denerim. As well as the Teyrn of Highever, due to a convenient rash of deaths in the Cousland family. And one would assume he is still the Arl of Amaranthine. One wonders what is left of Ferelden for Loghain to be “regent” of.

Once it became apparent that Howe was likely in Denerim rather than supervising the cleansing of bloodstains from the stones of my family holdings, I became far less comfortable lingering in the city, but I did stop by Brother Genitivi’s home briefly to speak with his assistant Weylan. Would you care to guess, unfortunate reader, if that event transpired as expected?

First Weylan told us that Brother Genitivi had been missing for quite some time, and that he was dreadfully concerned. He refused to tell us where Genitivi had been heading, as he had already given the information to some Redcliffe Knights who had subsequently also disappeared. He could not bear to send us into danger. When he could see that I refused to quail at the thought of potential peril, he relented and told me that Genitivi had planned to stay at the Spoiled Princess on the east shore of Lake Calenhad while he searched for something in the area.

As it so happens, I had visited that exact inn on both my recent visits the Circle of Magi, and I had seen no sign of any Chantry scholar on either occasion. I asked if I might search the house for helpful notes or clues to Genitivi’s further plans. I only asked as a courtesy; I was already getting the lay of the main room even as I did so. Weylan objected with surprising vehemence and all but panicked when I began to draw near to a particular door at the back of the room. So what could I do but attempt to open it? And what could Weylan do at that point, apparently, but launch a fireball at us, setting the entire room aflame?

We made short work of the apostate despite his element of surprise, but don’t worry, unfortunate reader, Genitivi will not be angry at us for the death of his assistant. You see, the real Weylan was already dead in the back room. The “Weylan” who greeted us hadn’t even bothered to dispose of the body, which was helpfully littered with identifying trinkets and documents and had clearly been rotting there for some time. Weylan looked to have been killed by magic, so the obvious assumption is that our fire-flinging friend had come to Genitivi’s house, murdered Weylan, and set about the process of deliberately misdirecting--or worse--anyone who should come looking for the scholar.

Why?

According to some papers we found at the house, Genitivi’s lead on the Urn of Sacred Ashes led him not to Lake Calenhad’s eastern shore at all, but to a village called Haven high in the Frostback Mountains.

His notes are compelling enough that I am willing to cross Thedas in order to follow his lead, but first there is one final matter here in Denerim that we must attend to: the attempt on Leliana’s life. I don’t have a great deal of faith, even if the address the assassin gave us is accurate, that an Orlesian bardmaster such as Marjolaine would have lingered in one place this long, but it would not be impossible. She has not heard back from the assassins she sent, I can attest, and so there is a chance she may still wait in the same place for word.

Once we have either ensured Leliana’s continued safety or confirmed that Marjolaine is not where we were told she would be, we shall head to the time-forgotten mountain village that Genitivi describes in his notes and see if we can find word either of the scholar, or better yet, of the legend he went there to pursue.

24 Kingsway

Location: Denerim, still  
Weather: Chill and gray  
Health: Bruised and exhausted  
Temper: Drowning in irony  
Events: Brothel adventures, feeding the Crows.

I suppose the events of the last two days are my fault for saying we needed to do “just one more thing” before leaving Denerim. That thing has been done, by the way: Marjolaine is dead. Leliana has become withdrawn since then, which is to be expected. I shall give her time to process events; I know her well enough to know she will find me when she is ready to talk.

And we were on our way out of Denerim, I assure you. But prominently displayed near one of the gates leading from the city was a poster that caught my eye. It warned the people of Denerim not to “believe the lies” and that the “griffons would rise again.” Now, unfortunate reader, I do not know if you are aware, but long ago the Grey Wardens used to ride griffons into battle, though the noble creatures have been extinct for many generations. The poster directed interested parties to the “hidden pearl,” which of course had to be none other than Denerim’s brothel.

“Those poor souls,” Zevran said, clicking his tongue as he read the poster.

“What do you mean?” I asked him.  
  
“They think they are setting a wolf-trap, but they are about to catch a dragon.”

I had not actually considered walking into the trap deliberately, but once Zevran put it that way, it seemed a good use of my wrath. 

Zevran found the Pearl delightful, as it reminded him of his childhood home. By an astonishing coincidence, there was a stunning Rivaini-Antivan woman there named Isabela that Zevran had some history with. We were briefly distracted by watching her fight off three men single-handedly in a brawl, and then we all settled down for a spirited game of Wicked Grace in which I caught Isabela cheating. Having seen her fight, I knew better than to make an issue of the deception. She bore no grudge about being caught; in fact, she seemed impressed. She kept dropping subtle invitations that I might have followed up on, had Morrigan not been sitting right there with us.

Isabela and Zevran were on surprisingly friendly terms, considering that they had met while he had been contracted to assassinate her husband. She seemed to have profited from the tragedy however; she has recently declared herself captain of her late husband’s ship the _Siren_, and has been using it to terrorize the Eastern Seas.

Zevran introduces me to the nicest people.

Anyhow, once we were done with our game, and once Zevran had flirted and traded gossip with Isabela to his heart’s content, I proceeded to a likely-looking back room and spoke the appropriate passphrase regarding griffons. To absolutely no one’s shock, the men waiting inside immediately attempted to kill us.

According to the blood-soaked documents I rifled through after I’d spent my rage, the leader of the group who’d been beheading Warden supporters for gold was named Paedan, and he had been directly employed by Rendon Howe. Once I discovered that, I carved up Paedan’s body in a more interesting fashion before leaving it to rot. Perhaps writing YOU ARE NEXT on his face with the point of a steak knife and then using said knife to pin Howe’s letter to his chest was unworthy of me, but as I may have mentioned before, I am angry.

After that I was most definitely on my way out of Denerim, but I was stopped at the gate by a little urchin with a summons. Given that the letter addressed me by name, and that it had come so soon after I had left mutilated bodies in my wake, I assumed it was another trap. I frankly hoped it was, as my blood was still humming with battle-rage, and I fear nothing with Morrigan beside me.

Another tavern, another back room. There I found Ignacio, an Antivan merchant I had bantered with briefly in the market not long after my arrival. Zevran, who had not been with me during my shopping expedition, immediately drew in a tense breath, and I quickly put pieces together. Ignacio was a Crow, which would suggest that the trap had been set for Zevran and not for me. As it turned out, it was neither. 

Ignacio did recognize Zevran, and knew of his recent history, but he assured me that Zevran was “already dead” in his eyes. He told us that a man named Taliesen held Zevran’s contract – a name that drew another wounded breath from Zevran – and that our business concerned another matter entirely. I managed to resist the urge to draw blades and instead heard him out. 

It seems that so many people in Ferelden want so many people dead right now that the Crows are locally shorthanded. By an astonishing coincidence, Paedan had been one of Ignacio’s targets, and so of all things, Ignacio had summoned me to the back room of the Gnawed Noble in order to pay me. There are rules, you see, and a strange code of honor about how the Crows operate.

Now, I did not wake this morning intending to become an assassin, but I most certainly entered a gray area when I accepted much-needed coin for a murder I had already committed. Once I had crossed into that gray area, it did not take long for Ignacio to ask if a man of my obvious “talents” might be willing to read some information about some other “interesting people” and then report back to him for payment if anything unfortunate should befall them.

Normally I would have drawn the line at deliberately killing people I had no business with, even if such activity would fund my crucial efforts against the Blight. But Ignacio found yet another way to sweeten the pot. He cannot, he told us, annul the contract Taliesen has on Zevran’s life, but he can see to it that if Taliesen asks for help in executing that contract, all other Crows are mysteriously unavailable to assist him. Having to worry only about one Crow – one Zevran apparently knows well and could to some extent anticipate – is a vastly better arrangement than having to be on watch for the entire organization. I agreed to help Ignacio, on the conditions that I could choose targets that were on my way in the course of ending the Blight, and that I would be told the circumstances surrounding each contract and would not be expected to kill an ally or violate any of my principles (aside from the one about killing people for money, which apparently wasn’t a very firm principle to begin with).

And that, unfortunate reader, is how Aedan Cousland, Grey Warden and rightful teyrn of Highever, not only survived assassination by the Antivan Crows, but came to work for them.

I pause to write this at a desk in Wonders of Thedas, the antiquity and magic shop I at last decided to risk visiting in search of information on the Qunari. My memory of the place was that it had a fantastic selection of books, and I was not disappointed. My disguise seemed sufficient to fool the proprietor, who appears to be the same Tranquil gentleman who was running the place a decade ago. Morrigan was caustically dismissive of the shop’s name when she saw the sign, but not five minutes after we entered, she was cooing rapturously over a Chasind fertility idol.

Ironically, I learned less about the Qunari from the shop’s book collection than from an overheard conversation between Sten and Zevran as they browsed the shelves. Zevran wanted to know Sten’s name; the elf observed that Sten was not a name, but a title. He knew this from some “easy on the eyes" Qunari he claimed to have met in Antiva.

Sten countered that anyone he met in Antiva was not Qunari. “They wear the faces of Qunari,” he said, but they are “fiends of Seheron,” something Sten called Tal-Vashoth. Zevran did not press this point, but persisted in asking what Sten’s actual name was. All Sten would say in reply was that Sten was enough, that it was who he was.

Morrigan appears to be finished browsing, and so, Maker willing, I am now truly leaving Denerim.


	11. Urn of Sacred Ashes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some legends are worth pursuing.

30 Kingsway

Location: Southron Hills  
Weather: Bright and cool  
Health: Fine  
Temper: Satisfied  
Events: Companions coming clean.

Did you know, unfortunate reader, that I’ve been traveling with a dead woman for months now? I certainly did not.

As we moved into the Southron Hills on our way to the alleged location of Haven, we ran into a group of darkspawn that had separated from the horde. Perhaps another group of “assassins” dispatched by the Archdemon; if so, they had no better luck in their appointed task than the last group. It is good that we were fully awake this time, however, because they ambushed us from over the crest of a hill, quickly flanking us, and without quick reflexes and precise tactics we might not have survived.

After the battle, Wynne collapsed. She was disoriented as I roused her, saying something about being certain it was “all over.” Her color was decidedly not good, and I was abruptly reminded of her advanced age (which is otherwise easy to forget). I was unable to halt our journey for the days required to be sure of her full recovery, as we have a tremendous amount of distance yet to cover, and the clock of the Blight continues ticking. But I checked in on her when we stopped for the evening, and she already appeared miraculously hale. She appreciated my concern, however, and she felt I had earned an explanation.

I was pleased to see something of our previous rapport returning, and so I very carefully measured my responses as she told me a story that I’d have flatly rejected as lunacy at the beginning of this journey. As recently as last spring, I had very clear ideas about demons and possession, but since then I have had my life saved by the Witch of the Wilds and have spoken with a benevolent spirit inhabiting a tree. My conception of what is and isn’t an “abomination” has broadened somewhat.

Since childhood, it seems, Wynne has felt the presence of a kind spirit watching over her in her dreams. A spirit of Faith, she believes. She claims that she died trying to save the children at Kinloch Hold, but that this spirit held her back, returned her to her body, saying that it was not yet time. She says the spirit is now anchored within her, keeping her alive until her task is done. As she sees it, she died at the Circle Tower, and every day since then has been a gift given to her by this spirit to allow her to fulfill a specific purpose. 

She assumes that her purpose is to help end the Blight. This assumption motivated her to leave the Circle Tower with me, but she can’t be completely certain about it. The spirit does not communicate with her, not in any way she clearly understands. It sometimes gives her vague impressions or feelings, but it cannot make its will fully understood.

As with Leliana and her vision, I cannot verify the truth of her story, only that she herself believes it. And as with Leliana, if this is a delusion, it is one that has driven her to help me, help Ferelden, help Thedas. It is the proverbial gift horse whose teeth best remain politely unexamined. Just saddle up the beast, and if it drops under you after a mile, well, that’s a mile you’d otherwise have gone on foot.

Speaking of Leliana, after a few days’ brooding she was ready to talk about what happened with Marjolaine. She felt genuine pain, of course, and it made her feel foolish to realize that she never knew Marjolaine as well as she thought she did. But even more than that, she was disturbed by how much she enjoyed finally getting her revenge. She has missed the thrill of the hunt, and the way that danger sharpens her senses, makes her feel alive. She worries that leaving the Chantry was a mistake, and that our exploits are causing her to fall back into bad habits.

I told her, as kindly as I could, that this was hogwash. Being oneself is not a “bad habit.” I’ve traveled with Leliana long enough to know that she was never meant to be some drab Chantry lay sister, spending her days in quiet contemplation. She is a lively young woman, much cleverer than she looks, with an array of subtle and deadly skills that were utterly wasted during that interlude of her life. She can always choose to let the Maker guide and restrain her in the use of those skills – He himself certainly did not shirk from violence against the evil of the Tevinter Imperium – but to set aside her gifts altogether is an insult to everything she is. The Maker gave her intelligence, and grace, and courage, and steady hands, and she is not serving Him by hiding all of that away.

She listened to my counsel, and I think she understood me. Leliana is not a person who makes decisions quickly when not in the heat of battle. But I could see in her eyes that what I said resonated with her.

I foresee great things for that young woman, if she survives the Blight. Having her committed to the cause will certainly increase her odds.  
  
  


10 Harvestmere

Location: Haven  
Weather: Bitterly cold  
Health: Weary  
Temper: Unnerved  
Events: A lost village discovered.

  
  
We’ve arrived in Haven, a small isolated village high in the mountains. Something is very wrong here, something beyond the punishing chill in the air, the thin atmosphere. I’ve found nothing concrete upon which to base my suspicions, and I am not sure how thoroughly we’ll be able to investigate. The guard at the gate seemed very eager for us to turn around and be on our way, and finding a place to make notes without his eyes upon me has been

\--

Of all the interruptions. Mutiny?

I scarcely know what to write; my hand is shaking. Of all people -- Sten. I can’t even say he’s gone mad, because I should have seen the signs much sooner. The way he took over when I was in the Deep Roads, the cutting comments he has made every time I mentioned the Urn. I know that he has been impatient to confront the Blight head-on, and does not understand the need for gathering armies and allies. I know the darkspawn are advancing. He saw their numbers and intent, just as I did. I know, too, that the Urn seems like a child’s desperate fantasy on the surface, if one doesn’t take into account all of the signs pointing to a concrete truth behind the story. But for Sten to challenge me outright?

Worst case scenario, I imagined he might leave us. Even that, I suppose I never imagined, not after the matter of the sword. I thought I had won his loyalty, perhaps even his friendship. But the Qun-- I have clearly underestimated how foreign a way of life it is. Is this how they settle things in Par Vollen? Whoever is left standing has the right of things? It’s as barbaric as the dwarves. What a fool I was for putting so much trust in someone whose philosophy of life I know nothing about.

Sten drew his blade -- the very blade I had found for him! -- and tried to take over leadership of our squad by force. I am fortunate that Oghren has been teaching me how to better harness my battle rage, because I was nearly blinded by it. But I did not lose control; I focused the white-hot pain of betrayal into every thrust and slash, and I wounded him so grievously that he was forced to return to our camp east of town. After the fight, Wynne healed the slash Sten had made with <<Asala>>--the cut that opened me to the bone--but Sten refused to submit to her magic.

I wish I could have held onto my anger, because grief is worse. Sten looked so utterly and abjectly contrite after his defeat--it was as though he realized he had shattered something valuable, and to what end? He could not even look me in the eye.

I need a moment to regroup, which is why I have stopped to write. Morrigan, Zevran, and Oghren are continuing forward with me; the rest will stay to watch Sten in camp. I keep thinking about how little Sten cared for his life when I met him, and I have told Wynne that if it seems necessary, she has my permission to force her magic upon him. I refuse to be simply another means by which this broken creature attempts suicide.

\--

The town is led by “Revered Father” Eirik. Father? Since when have men been priests?

We are told to trade for supplies at the town store and be on our way.

\--

The shopkeeper, the only soul I’ve seen here so far besides the guard, was very defensive when we tried to enter the back room of his shop. His urgency reminded me of the false Waylan in Genitivi’s house in Denerim. This time I did not press the matter, as I am still too shaken from my confrontation with Sten to invite a surprise fireball or the like. But what is back there, I wonder?

\--

We found another human in this strangely empty village: that makes three in total. A small boy has a “lucky” finger bone that he found “over by the mountain.” We are in the mountains, boy. I assume he means along the curving path that climbs the cliffside toward the Chantry. What are human bones doing scattered about for children to find?

\--

Zevran found a cottage whose door was sheltered from the sight of villagers, and he picked the lock. Inside the vacant home, among the usual sort of furnishings, stood an altar whose entire surface, including the sides, was stained with relatively fresh blood. Morrigan (somehow, I shudder to ask) could tell that the blood was human--and that no one could have lost so much and lived.

\--

We went to the Chantry, where all of the townsfolk seemed to be gathered. That explained the seemingly deserted nature of the village, if nothing else. A rather odd sermon was in progress.

Zevran murmured under his breath, "Just once I'd like to walk into one of these places and discover a lively dance, or a drinking festival. Or an orgy. But alas, no." 

Father Eirik stopped the service and sent most of the townspeople away so that he could “greet the newcomers.” By which he apparently meant, have his guards kill us. Or try.

The bastard was determined to make it impossible for us to question him; he fought to the last. I was beginning to think that we’d slaughtered our way to yet another dead end when Zevran cleverly spotted a loose section of the stone wall that concealed a secret room.

There: Brother Genitivi. He’d been imprisoned there for months, and was in remarkably good health and spirits for one who had clearly endured torture. It seems they’ve been trying to get information out of him about his research on the Sacred Ashes -- why, he has no idea, as the temple in which they’re rumored to be held is right up the mountain from here. The locals ought to know more than he, should they not? Most puzzling of all, he says they speak of Andraste as though she is alive, and residing somewhere in the temple. 

They must mean her ashes, surely. 

Father Eirik had a medallion that Genitivi says opens the way to the temple. With him dead, Genitivi now has the opportunity he traveled all this way for. After what he has been through, I could not deny him, but I worry about him. Morrigan was able to heal his injured leg, but it is too late for his foot, we think. He needs to have it amputated sooner rather than later. For now, though, he refused to go back without at least a look inside the temple. Scholars!

\--

I have to confess, this temple is astonishing. Ice and snow have wreaked havoc with the stonework, but it must have been breathtaking in its day; even Morrigan showed it a sort of wide-eyed reverence. Genitivi stayed near the entrance, where it’s safer, happily making notes on the innumerable carvings. We have continued deeper, fighting our way through occasional knots of cultists, many of which are armed and possessed of a peculiar strength and tolerance for pain that Oghren agrees goes even beyond standard berserker training.

Zevran is boyishly excited about the place, which surprised me. I had never thought him an enthusiast of history, much less religious history. He recognized statues of Maferath and Hessarian before I did. 

“What?” he said when I stared at him. “I went to the Chantry as a child.” The man continues to reveal layers upon layers.

\--

Caves, now, mostly, with tunnels leading occasionally to manmade chambers. This section of the temple is inhabited almost entirely by drakes and dragonlings.

I have a terrible feeling about this.

\--

Near the back exit of the temple/cave complex we found a man named Father Kolgrim, who cares for “the risen Andraste” and her kin. In exchange he is allowed to partake of their blood, to give him and his holy soldiers great strength and ferocity in battle.

Ah, you didn’t realize that Andraste had returned as a high dragon? Neither had I, as it happens. She’s quite lovely, or so I told Father Kolgrim to keep him and his dragon-sipping goons from killing us and feeding us to her. Zevran and Morrigan in particular were exhausted from the constant fighting by that point, and all I wanted was to get to the Sacred Ashes. 

The Ashes are indeed here, at a separate temple past the dragon-infested one, on the mountaintop. But there is a Guardian there (not the high dragon, who seems to recognize Kolgrim as one of her own) that refuses to let the Father past. It might have something to do with the fact that the good Father wants to empty a vial of dragon blood into the Urn to reunite the “risen Andraste” with her former self.

And here is where I must tell you--this mountaintop temple is no hoax. Nor is it madness induced by thin mountain air. I have seen how the ice has not sundered this temple the way it has the one below. I have seen the uncanny Guardian standing at its unblemished threshold, and I believe that he is what he claims to be: some immortal remnant of one of Andraste’s disciples. He guards the Ashes, presiding over a Gauntlet that he claimed separates the faithful from the wicked.

I looked to my left: Morrigan. To my right: Oghren and Zevran. I asked the Guardian if I might come back in a little while, after giving the matter some thought. (Even if by some miracle I am considered “pure” enough to be worthy to look upon the ashes of Andraste, I think my current company would be doomed.)

Both the Guardian and Kolgrim (whose dirty work I said I’d do, before I saw the Guardian) were more than happy to let me return to camp and acquire a former templar and lay sister to help me pass whatever tests lie in store. I shall have a night’s rest here and then return. 

As soon as I arrived here, I stopped by Sten’s tent to check on him. He did not look well; his gray skin had gone nearly white. He reached out to me, closed a huge hand around my forearm. “I was wrong,” he said. “You are strong enough. You will defeat this Blight.”

“We will,” I said. “If you will follow.”

“You have slain me,” he said. “It is no less than I deserve.”

At this, I became angry. I told him he was weak. I knew he had wanted to die since the moment he lost his sword, but he was not allowed to die until he had answered the question of his <<arishok>>. I told him that his mistakes, no matter how grievous, did not exempt him from his duty to the Qun.

Perhaps I have come to understand the Qun better than I realized, because I finally seemed to get through to him. I told him he was to submit to Wynne’s healing magic, and any other magic I told him to submit to, because I had proven myself worthy to command him twice over. I told him he was free to question my orders in peaceful moments whenever he liked, but he was never again to openly challenge me for leadership.

He said, “So be it,” and closed his eyes. I left his tent and sent Wynne in to care for him. He will be all right, she said, when she returned. And then she sat with me a while.

We talked about the Wardens, about the idea of self-sacrifice. She told me of when she was fifteen--a girl who hardly sounds like the same woman. A bitter, angry girl, feeling trapped by the Circle, denied romance and family and adventure. She told me how she had found herself in the Circle’s Chantry one day, silently railing at the Maker, when a Mother came and sat with her. Wynne says that she came to realize that priests also give up much of the world in order to do their duty, and yet the Mother seemed content, even grateful. Over the years Wynne has begun to feel a great deal of kinship with priests, and her studies have leaned toward healing ever since.

After hearing this, I asked Wynne if she would accompany Alistair, Leliana and myself to see the Guardian in the morning. She was touched. I’ve sidelined her for so much of this journey, thinking of her as fragile, but she has more than proven herself. And if the Urn of Sacred Ashes does indeed lie at the end of this Gauntlet, I can think of no one who has lived a better life or better earned the right to see it.

10 Harvestmere

Location: Hinterlands Camp  
Weather: Cold and crisp, like a Harvestmere apple.  
Health: Perfect  
Temper: Beatific  
Events: The presence of Andraste

Whatever my views on the Maker, I can never again doubt Andraste. I will not detail the Gauntlet that we four had to pass through to reach Her ashes. I believe it should be for each person to experience for himself – and I imagine many will, now that Brother Genitivi (perhaps unwisely) means to spread word of the temple’s location. It may not even be the same tests for each, who can say? I and my three companions, so far, are the only ones to pass the trial in living memory.

Suffice it to say that I learned more of Andraste’s history, and I can assure all skeptics that She is no empty legend. Whether She was truly blessed by the Maker, or was a mage of purer heart and greater power than any before or after Her, or whether She was some manner of god or spirit herself, I cannot say. But I carry a pinch of her ashes with me, and I have no doubt in my mind that they will cure Arl Eamon. Even their nearness, in such a small quantity, has filled me with an almost terrifying energy and serenity. 

I never touched them myself, handling them only with gloves. I did not want to dilute their potency. I may sound like a madman to you, unfortunate reader, but you were not there. No one can pass through the Gauntlet at the temple and stand before Her earthly remains and not feel the vastness of the power that Her sacrifice unleashed upon the world.

This experience bonded the four of us in a way that is difficult to describe. Any of our previous disagreements, any tensions between us – they all seem so small now. I forgive Alistair his weaknesses, Leliana her deceptions, Wynne her stubbornness. They forgive me my recklessness, my callous decisions, my cynicism. We have all stood before Andraste, and been judged worthy of Her love.

I’ve just finished a long conversation with Wynne, in fact, about how she has at last found peace regarding a regret that has haunted her for decades. One of her first apprentices, a city elf named Aneirin, was so discouraged by her stern methods that he fled the circle and had to be hunted down by templars. It took standing before Andraste for her to understand that two things can at the same time be true: that Aneirin’s death can be due to Wynne’s negligence, pride, and stubbornness -- and that it can also be due to Aneirin’s own recklessness and closed mind. Furthermore, it can simultaneously be a mistake and part of a broader pattern that is ultimately for the good.

I should write this down while I still have the ashes on my person, while I still have a clarity of mind I know I shall lose when they are gone: creation is so much larger than we will ever understand. There are patterns at work that we are too close to view. Our analysis of the meaning of any event can only ever be a limited and hobbled one. If our analysis comforts us, then we should embrace it. If not, we should reject it, because it means we are not capable of understanding the beauty in the greater whole.

Pain only exists at close range. Andraste was serene as she burned, seeing her destruction from the Maker’s vantage point. We, as ordinary mortal creatures, are trapped in pain’s cage, at least for now. But there is comfort in knowing that there is another way to view any circumstance, and that perhaps one day we will be free of our limitations, and we will at last understand.

12 Harvestmere

Location: Redcliffe Castle  
Weather: Rubbish  
Health: Fine  
Temper: Wretched  
Events: A terrible plan is better than no plan, I suppose.

Arl Eamon is doing just splendidly now. Meanwhile, Ferelden is doomed.

Due to the Blight, we can’t defeat Loghain with a clash of armies, so instead we must call a Landsmeet and convince the majority of nobles there that Alistair – Alistair_ – _should be the next king of Ferelden.

Balls, balls, balls.

I’m not saying he’d be the worst king we’ve ever had, even if we exclude the Orlesian ones. The Theirin line has certainly produced worse (Arland, who served the teyrn of Highever’s head on a silver platter, comes to mind). But Ferelden needs better than a reluctant, self-mocking, half-trained templar at this particular juncture in history. Unfortunately, there is no one else who stands even a remote chance of challenging Loghain. Maric left no other heirs.

And so we return to Denerim. This time, I shall not hide.


	12. The Game of Kings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aedan arrives in Denerim, and the pieces on the board begin to move.

25 Harvestmere

Location: Denerim  
Weather: Bitter  
Temper: Bitter  
Events: Politics, politics, politics.

No one but I shall ever know how close I came to dying on a woman’s sword in my first ten minutes in Denerim. Arl Eamon and I, on our way to his city estate, were intercepted by the most maddening possible welcoming party: Teyrn Loghain, Rendon Howe, and some boot-licking bitch of Loghain’s by the name of Ser Cauthrien. Her apparent job was to make vicious threats, hand on the hilt of her fancy blade, any time Arl Eamon so much as cast a flirtatious glance at the truth.

I don’t remember anything Loghain and Eamon talked about. I have a vague recollection of Loghain’s bombastic voice, but the words themselves were lost in a haze of murderous rage at the sight of Howe. No, I will not call him an arl, much less “Teyrn,” and anyone who does the latter in my presence will get to choose which bone of theirs I break. 

Howe didn’t even glance in my direction during the conversation, but Maker’s breath, if a man could die from toxic doses of adjacent hatred, that leaky sack of cat-shit would have dropped on the spot. You would think, after all these months, that my visceral need to show him his entrails would have lessened, but it has not. Not at all. The entire time Eamon and Loghain had their civilized verbal war, I was consumed with fantasies of Howe’s abject suffering.

I did manage to endure the encounter without murdering anyone. There will be a time and a place for such things, oh yes, unfortunate reader. But not today.

We’re settled in at Arl Eamon’s Denerim estate, which is surprisingly well-appointed for a place he only visits occasionally. Maker, I’d forgotten how good it felt to have a good wash, proper food, and a decent bed. I adapted well enough to rough living when on the run, but I’m afraid I’m a nobleman to my bones, and right now I am basking in luxury the way a plant basks in sunlight.

Bricks has had difficulty readjusting to the confines of a noble household when he had grown accustomed to romping about in the open air all day and night. As for Zevran’s Rinna, we’ve had to chain her out in the yard, as she as not at all suited for indoor life. The poor thing is miserable, but so long as Zevran goes out to sit with her, she seems fine. To spare us all the sound of her constant howling, I suspect Zevran will be spending the night in the yard as well.

Earlier today, Alistair asked me to go with him to the home of a laundress named Goldanna, who is apparently his half-sister on his mother’s side. Calling her “low-class” would be kind; she berated Alistair as though he had deliberately killed their mother in childbirth, and even when he promised to help her and her family, she showed not the faintest glimmer of gratitude. The boy was crushed. I think he had hoped to find family, after a life spent failing to belong in one place after another.

Morrigan berated Alistair for making a promise to help Goldanna, calling the woman a “parasite” and warning Alistair that he would now be hounded by her for the rest of his days. All Alistair could see was Morrigan’s lack of generosity; he failed to notice that she was being protective of him. He was too busy mourning a lost chance at a sister to notice that he apparently already has one.

Sten has concerns about the defensibility of Eamon’s estate, but is otherwise settling in well. I have been curious about the Tal-Vashoth, these “fiends of Seheron” he mentioned to Zevran, and so I inquired. It was difficult to obtain from him any coherent picture of Seheron’s political situation. He said that the Tal-Vashoth wish the Qunari dead, and the Qunari wish to continue living. You would think I’d have learned, by now, not to expect answers from Sten.

I assume the Tal-Vashoth must be those of Sten’s race who reject Qunari teachings. From what Sten described of the Tal-Vashoth’s activities in Seheron, I can see why he believes them evil. All the same, I would like to hear their side. Nuance is not in Sten’s nature – perhaps not in any Qunari’s. There is comfort in certainty, I suppose, but it is not the way of the Andrastian faith. We must be prepared to accept contradictions, to forgive doubts, or else we would go mad with despair.

26 Harvestmere

Location: Denerim  
Weather: Cold and clear  
Health: Invigorated  
Temper: Gratified  
Events: A murder of Crows.

I could kiss Ignacio. This morning, just when I was getting as restless as poor Rinna in the Arl’s estate, the canny old Crow called upon my talents as an assassin. The job could not have been more lovingly hand-picked. 

Some of Howe’s most favored men, including a loathsome fellow called Captain Chase, were waiting in the back alleys of Denerim for a ransom. Howe has resorted to kidnapping a young boy, for reasons I cannot fathom. I pleaded with Ignacio to tell me whose son had been taken – I might know the family – but apparently the Crows stake their reputation on their confidentiality as well as their efficacy. The Crows were already at work, with disguised agents delivering the ransom in a few hours, but they were going to need backup. I was more than happy to agree.

Unfortunately, en route a less friendly group of Crows found us. I cannot count it as coincidence, but I also do not believe that Ignacio set us up deliberately. I can tell when a man values me.

Zevran had been prepared by Ignacio for the presence of Taliesen – a friend from childhood, it seems, possibly more – and so the elf was remarkably calm when the young man confronted him. Taliesen was surrounded by armed Crows, but rather than attack he asked Zevran to return with him to Antiva. He had a story prepared that would exonerate them both for failing to kill their targets (myself, and Zevran, respectively).

I suddenly wished I had answered differently when Zevran asked me, weeks ago, whether I had serious feelings for Morrigan. I know that my answer wounded him, and while I have continued to treat him with the kindness of a friend, what is friendship compared to redemption in the eyes of the Crows? I felt a momentary qualm of fear as I envisioned Sten, Morrigan, and I battling a dozen trained assassins in addition to Zevran, who has had ample time to learn our habits and weaknesses in combat. But I knew that Taliesen had no intention of letting me walk away, even if I were inclined to let Zevran go without a fight. Which I was not.

To my surprise, Zevran backed me up. Perhaps it was our deal with Ignacio that gave him the confidence he needed, or perhaps it was my friendship, or my chances of winning this battle whichever side he took -- or perhaps it was all of these things combined. Whatever the reason, he fought at our side instead of at Taliesen’s, and though it was a terrible battle, Morrigan’s magic tipped the balance as always, and we were victorious.

Afterward, as he cleaned his blades, Zevran mused that for the first time since failing to kill me, his destiny was his to decide. I considered reminding him that he had sworn himself to my service and should honor that oath, but something came over me that I can only call pity, though that word seems unkind. I felt sorrow for the life Zevran has led, always a weapon for someone else’s use. I have come to genuinely care about him, and even though the thought of his departure cut me to the bone, I could not bear to be the next in a line of uncaring handlers.

I compromised, and lightheartedly made the case that while the choice was his own, he was more likely to stumble across priceless ancient treasures in my company. His readiness to accept this line of reasoning told me all I needed to know. He wanted to stay, but he needed me to ask. I was more than happy to make an offering to his pride; Maker knows I have plenty to spare.

We arrived at the meeting place worse for wear but still in fighting condition. The boy wasn’t there. Unsurprisingly, Howe’s men showed no proof whatsoever of the boy’s continued well-being and still demanded the money. With the support of the handful of Crows that had shown up in disguise, we slaughtered Howe’s goons to the last man.

I could not share Ignacio’s delight in the outcome; all I could think of was the boy. I know all too well the disregard Howe’s men have for children. When Ignacio ascertained the reason for my distress, he reassured me; the nobleman in question had hired two teams with separate objectives: one to rescue the boy, one to eliminate Captain Chase. Both teams had succeeded, and the boy was safe at home. The vastness of my relief at this news surprised me; I nearly had to sit down, and I don’t even know who the boy is. 

I did ask again. Ignacio again politely refused to tell, but he suggested cryptically that I “might find out, in time.”

How was it, I wondered aloud, that they had gone from working for Loghain and hunting Wardens to working with Wardens and hunting Loghain’s allies, and for once he gave me a straightforward answer. The Crows want the Blight defeated. For a time, they thought the legendary Loghain Mac Tir the best man for the job. But Loghain has continually and substantively failed to deal with the threat. The Crows have lost faith in him, and they have transferred that faith to me.

I have nothing more to fear from the Crows, and in fact, I would say that I can count them as silent allies, to the extent that the Crows take any side but their own. With Taliesen and his men dead, Zevran has nothing further to fear from them either. The world is still hurtling into the maw of the Blight, but in this moment, at least, I am pleased and proud. Between the werewolves, Paragon Branka, the Crows, and Zevran himself, it would seem that I have a knack for turning enemies into allies.

28 Harvestmere

Location: Denerim  
Weather: A warm spell  
Health: Good  
Temper: Shaken, yet amused  
Events: A damsel in distress, a night in prison

The last sentence of my previous entry seems a bit prophetic in retrospect. This morning I awoke to the news that Queen Anora had been imprisoned at Howe’s estate. Her elven chambermaid seemed certain that the queen would be killed and her death pinned on Arl Eamon if we did not rescue her. 

I told Eamon the entire scenario sounded like a trap. Eamon rightly pointed out that if so, we were already caught. Both Howe and Loghain had shown a pattern of framing others for their own crimes, and it seemed all too plausible that doing nothing might result in disaster. Luckily, the elven maid had a plan. 

Might I say that Wynne looks positively adorable in a guard’s uniform? She wasn’t the most convincing specimen I’ve ever seen, but I didn’t know if Queen Anora would require healing when we found her, and I didn’t want to take the chance of infiltrating the late Arl of Denerim’s estate only to have to smuggle out Her Majesty’s corpse. I brought Sten and Zevran, my most trusted blades, as well, in case things went horribly wrong. 

The uniforms worked like a charm; we took pains to blend in, to look decisively on our way somewhere even when utterly lost, and not to get too close to anyone who seemed competent. It was unfortunately rather easy to get lost in a place the size of the Arl’s estate. I heard one of the guards comment to another that Howe should tear the place down and rebuild, as it was bad luck to live in a place where the entire family had died. The other retorted that Howe would have to knock down every place owned. I’m sure if I hadn’t been a Cousland I’d have found the joke terribly amusing.

As with all perfectly-conceived plans, this one hit a snag almost immediately. I’d had the foresight to bring a lock expert, but in the time since Queen Anora had sent her maid for help, someone had added a magical barrier to the door of her room. My cynicism prompted me to ask how I was to ascertain the queen’s identity through six inches of solid oak. 

“Shall I try to slide my crown under the door?” she returned acerbically. “Did you suppose the royal family has a secret knock?” 

My parents had met the queen before, but neither I nor anyone in my company had ever had the pleasure. It could have been anyone’s voice behind that door. She certainly sounded queenly, but that was reason enough for doubt. Wasn’t she supposed to be the daughter of a farmer and a cabinet-maker? All the same, when she suggested I find the responsible mage, a man who would likely be at Howe’s side, I found myself abruptly in full support of her plan. Showing my face to Howe would spoil our “guard” ruse, but I’d been looking for an excuse to chat with him, and so off we went with directions from the maid to his chambers.

We found Howe’s chambers vacant, so I took the opportunity to thoroughly search them. Locked in a chest was something very peculiar: a sheaf of papers that had clearly belonged to a Grey Warden. There was a list of Wardens confirmed dead at Ostagar, as well as a list of Duncan’s recruits. One set of papers was written in some sort of code or cipher but clearly embossed with the Grey Warden seal.

There was also an interior door. I am unsurprised that Howe chose chambers with a door leading directly down to a dungeon full of torture equipment, but the sheer expanse of the dungeons left me wondering about the late arl as well. As I approached the first cell, a guard who was attending the prisoner inside turned as though to address or approach me. Before he could speak, an arm snaked out from inside the bars, wrapped around his throat to drag him closer, and then another hand grabbed him by the hair to snap his neck.

That, unfortunate reader, was my introduction to Riordan, senior Grey Warden of Jader. Imagine my shock, after growing accustomed to the idea that Alistair and I were the only Grey Wardens left in Ferelden, to find a Warden of vast experience and knowledge right here in Denerim.

Though he claims to have been born in my own Highever before joining the Wardens, his extensive time in Orlais was clear from his accent. Still, Highever does breed a particularly ferocious sort, does it not? Riordan had originally led a large force from Orlais at Cailan’s invitation, but they had been turned back at the border, and so as a native Fereldan he had come alone to investigate. He had then made the mistake of accepting a drink from Rendon Howe.

His news was not particularly heartening. The Orlesian Wardens, you see, have no intention of trying to defy Loghain’s ban. The Wardens take a long view of Blights; they know how many cities usually fall before the darkspawn are stopped. Rather than sacrifice Warden lives in something so petty as a foreign civil war, they will simply let foolish Ferelden destroy itself, then stop the darkspawn horde when it attempts to move on.

Riordan was wasted and exhausted from his desperate burst of violence after so many days in a cell. Rather than insist that he accompany us to fight Howe, we let him find his way out wearing the uniform of the guard he’d murdered and make his way to Arl Eamon’s estate.

As I mentioned, the dungeons were… extensive. Chained to a table further in we found young Oswyn, son of Sighard of the Dragon’s Peak bannorn. He’d come looking for a friend who’d returned from Ostagar with damning stories about Loghain’s retreat. Howe had entertained Oswyn’s questions about the missing veteran with amiable concern, then treated him to the same variety of drink he’d given Riordan. Wynne was able to heal Oswyn well enough that he could walk out, but his bones had been broken in such a complex way that he’ll hobble for the rest of his life.

We had to slaughter our way through at least two dozen guards to find Howe; he stood in the company of not one but two mages. We weren’t certain which of them was responsible for the barrier on the door upstairs, but as they were both hurling fireballs at us it didn’t particularly matter.

As it worked out, we were able to save Howe for last. I suppose it would be heroic to say I delivered swift justice, but I know how to cripple a man with my blades, and I may have drawn the whole thing out longer than necessary.

Once I had Howe prone, his lifeblood creeping across the floor toward the drain meant to dispose of others’, I demanded to know why he’d slaughtered my family, not that any answer would have persuaded me to spare his life. His blood-flecked rambling did little to enlighten me. It seems he’s gone mad over the years, letting his resentment at my father’s success turn into a creeping paranoia about our family’s relationship to Orlais. He died certain that my father was a traitor to our nation, and that he himself deserved all the glory Ferelden had heaped upon the Couslands.

Rotten luck for him. No wiser or happier than when I’d entered, I left Howe’s corpse to grow cold on the stones of his last victim’s dungeon. I’ve read many times that vengeance does nothing to satisfy the soul, but I never believed it. Unfortunate reader, I doubt you’ll believe it if I write it, either. There are some things one simply must experience for oneself.  
  
I did not leave the dungeon before freeing the rest of Howe’s prisoners. Enemy of my enemy, as they say. One of them, the son of the late arl of Denerim, has always been a colossal prick, but I needed him to testify at the Landsmeet, so I unlocked his cell. I also found a templar who appeared to have lost his wits when separated from his lyrium. With some gentle questioning I was able to identify him as Irminric, brother to Bann Alfstanna. He had been in charge of bringing in the escaped blood mage Jowan, and Loghain’s men had needed Jowan for their own purposes.

It was a relief to finally climb the stairs from that wretched place and return to the room where Queen Anora was being held. Its door could now be unlocked, and Her Majesty surprised me by making her consummately courteous introduction dressed in a guard’s uniform herself. Maker’s Breath, I’d thought Wynne looked adorable.

Anora Mac Tir could not look less like her father, with her golden hair and her porcelain-doll face. She does, however, seem to have inherited a spine of pure dragonbone. I’m a head taller than she is, and yet she somehow gave the impression of towering over me.

I asked why on earth she was disguised, and as she donned her helmet she responded that until she could sort out exactly who wanted her dead she’d best not draw attention to herself. I promised her safety at Arl Eamon’s estate, which on reflection was a bit presumptuous of me, given that I was stopped not five minutes later by Ser Cauthrien. Loghain’s lap dog had found the gory mess in the dungeons, and she had made an educated guess about its source.

Ser Cauthrien was kind enough to let my friends go free provided that I surrendered peacefully -- what choice did I have? Risk everyone’s lives because my pride forced me to go down fighting? And that, Unfortunate Reader, is how I ended up locked up in Fort Drakon.

Until yesterday, I had only ever seen Fort Drakon from the outside. Any visitor to Denerim can’t help but notice the sky-piercing ancient tower that Tevinter mages raised from the side of Dragon’s Peak, and anyone of noble blood does their best to own an estate in its shadow. But inside the fort one finds the precise opposite of nobility, at least these days: it serves a dual function as a prison and as a barracks for the city guard. Whatever it was built for, however, was larger in scale than anything Fereldans can fill it with on a daily basis, and so the interior with its vaulted corridors and vast rooms has a dark, abandoned quality.

Upon arrival I was beaten, stripped of my clothes and belongings, given a stained loincloth to wear, and tossed into a cell. Either they didn’t care about the ring on my hand or some magic prevented them from seeing it, for they left it where it was. Turning it around and around on my finger, I smiled to myself in the dark, knowing that I need only patiently bide my time. 

Sure enough, in the small hours of the night, echoing screams and howling wind became faintly audible in nearby chambers, and the nervous guard who remained rooted stubbornly outside my cell soon found himself rising helplessly into the air, breath crushed from him, at a gesture from the feral she-creature silhouetted in the nearby doorway.

“Morrigan,” I greeted her. “What a pleasant surprise.”

It wasn’t a surprise, of course. But Zevran had accompanied her, which did surprise me. I could imagine the two of them fighting over the right to rescue me, perhaps, but working together? He immediately busied himself unlocking my cell, and once I was free I embraced him by way of thanks, despite my near nudity. Then I kissed Morrigan until her knees melted.

As soon as she caught her breath, Morrigan informed me that Queen Anora had fled to Arl Eamon’s estate and that she seemed genuinely distraught at my having been captured.

“You do make an impression on women, don’t you, Warden,” she said dryly.

“Not just women,” was Zevran’s cheerful addition. “Look at that face. Can you blame them?”

I was glad to find the two of them in good spirits; the dreary ambiance of the place had begun to sap my will. They helped me dress, and Morrigan did her best to tend to my bruises, though she is not what one would call a gifted healer.

I had thought Morrigan might be inventing or at least exaggerating Queen Anora’s concern for me – Morrigan has a peculiar, indirect way of staking out her territory – but when I returned to Eamon’s estate just before dawn I found the young queen pacing the halls, her chambermaid following despondently. When the queen spotted me, she wrung her hands for a moment before remembering her royal composure and lacing them before her.

She was not in the least apologetic for putting me at such risk in the first place, but she did seem genuinely distressed over the way things had turned out. I sat her down for a little talk, as it was obvious that she’d be unable to get any rest until she had things squared away. She isn’t used to chaos, I can see. Like her father, she prides herself in being a master of the game, and does not appreciate being used as a pawn.

She opened up to me more than I expected, given how recently we were on opposite sides of a civil war. But I am not the one trying to put Alistair Theirin on the throne, and the queen has recently come to understand that her father is not fit to lead either. I can see that she still cares for him deeply but no longer trusts him. What terrifies her most is that because her father has such a sterling record of service to Ferelden, people lap up his recent rantings about Grey Wardens and Orlesians and conspiracies as eagerly as they do the Chant. 

The truth of the matter is, both Queen Anora and I would be perfectly happy for her to remain on the throne, so long as she is severed from her father’s influence. And because I reassured her on this point, she wishes to ally with me. She believes that with a bit more time, she can give me the ammunition I need to disgrace her father before the Landsmeet.

I told her that what she would need to do first, if she was to be of any help to me, was get a few hours’ sleep. This seemed to startle her. I suppose giving orders has become habit these past months, and I forgot for a moment that I was in the presence of my queen. After a moment’s confusion, she agreed and bid me a courteous farewell. I would not have thought any further about the interaction if I had not caught the incredulous smile on her chambermaid’s face as she looked between the two of us. Did the elf notice something I did not?

Is it possible that even as steely a woman as the daughter of Loghain Mac Tir might find herself charmed by a skilled, fearless, blue-blooded, honorable, and picturesquely brooding Grey Warden rescuer? Particularly a rescuer that seems much more capable of matching wits and hatching plots with her than her late husband?

Is it possible that I have stayed up more than another hour writing because I was rendered sleepless by the implications of the young widowed Queen of Ferelden potentially feeling an inclination toward the de facto teyrn of Highever? 

It is not a match my father would have dreamed of… Anora Mac Tir was intended for Cailan Theirin more or less from birth. And yet here we are in a world with no Cailan, and the queen without an heir. She must marry again. Is there anyone who would make a better match for Ferelden’s queen than a Cousland who has proven himself capable of leadership under the most trying of circumstances?

It’s possible I may just need a few more hours’ sleep myself.


	13. The Landsmeet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fate of Ferelden is decided.

29 Harvestmere

Location: Denerim  
Events: A proposal and a disruption of slave trading

Let me open with the most delightful news I’ve heard since… last year sometime, probably. According to a notice posted on the board, the Chantry is offering to pay people to attend Rendon Howe’s funeral. 

It seems that Thomas, the only one of his children half-witted enough to idolize him, died in Loghain’s wretched civil war, and Nathaniel and Delilah apparently can’t be arsed to make the trip to Denerim. I can’t remember if Howe married again after that Bryland woman died, but in any case, Howe’s passing will apparently be honored by a miscellaneous gaggle of paid mourners, and somehow this satisfies me even more than having sliced him to ribbons on a dungeon floor.

I’m afraid that’s all the good news I have for you today, unfortunate reader. Today’s victories were either conditional or of the sort that, at best, return things from an acute state of atrocity to a miserable status quo.

After Queen Anora got what she erroneously believes to be a sufficient amount of sleep, she insisted upon meeting with Arl Eamon and myself regarding her father’s plans. She has noted extreme unrest in Denerim’s alienage since Ostagar – including a riot that had to be put down with catastrophic violence. Since very few of Denerim’s elves took part in the battle at Ostagar, Her Majesty suspects that either her father or Howe must have done something terrible in the alienage as part of their plans to seize power.

During this meeting, Queen Anora also confronted Arl Eamon about the weakness of Alistair’s claim to the throne. Alistair was not part of the meeting and had no desire to be, but he was standing within earshot. To my surprise he did not object when Her Majesty pointed out that Theirin blood was worth little in the accounting, for it had been she and not Cailan who had been running the country for the past half-decade. 

Eamon did not dispute her assessment of the country’s leadership, but he believes that the unbroken line of descent from King Calenhad is the soul of Ferelden’s unity and identity – the very thing they fought to preserve in the rebellion against Orlais – and that without it, Ferelden will split once again into warring states.

At this point, Alistair decided to speak up. To Eamon’s visible dismay, he had a reasonable point: now that Anora has turned against her father, there is actually no further reason to try and remove her from the throne. None of this business is her fault after all, and she’s been doing a fine job as queen. Thus spoke the supposed better candidate, arguing against his own coronation!

Eamon quickly covered his initial reaction and tried to spin Alistair’s reluctance into a point in his favor. The best leaders, he argued, are modest and uninterested in power. He believes that Alistair’s strong moral compass and willingness to ask for help would ensure that, in time, he could mature into a just and compassionate ruler.

My gaze found the queen’s at his comment about “willingness to ask for help,” because we were both well aware of the rumors that Eamon intends to rule through his inexperienced, biddable protege. It was a poor choice of words that demonstrated Eamon’s shaky grasp of current public sentiment. At this point, Queen Anora thanked Eamon for his counsel and asked if she might speak with me privately.

To my surprise, the first thing she did was apologize for the fact that, in all the commotion yesterday, she never found the time to express her sorrow over what happened to my parents.

“Your mother Eleanor, in particular, was dear to me,” she said. “While I did not get to see her as often as I would have liked, it is no exaggeration to say that as I was growing up, I modeled myself after her example. I am, you may have noticed, rather a hard woman by nature, which I believe a valuable trait in a ruler, but there are times when softness and grace serve better, and your mother was always the person I called to mind when trying to develop these qualities. Eleanor could loose an arrow into a target one moment and soothe a skinned knee the next. I loved my own mother, and try to reflect the best of her qualities, but of all the women I have known, Eleanor Cousland was the one who most represented the sort of effortlessly elegant and virtuous noblewoman I aspire to be.”

I was so shaken by this clearly heartfelt (if obviously at least somewhat rehearsed) speech that I entirely forgot the purpose of our meeting. I do not doubt her sincere admiration of my mother, but we must admit, unfortunate reader, that her timing was exquisite. I would not respect Her Majesty as I do if I did not believe her to be a brilliant strategist, and frankly, it’s the sort of thing I would have done. Soften up the soil before planting your ideas.

From there she went on to say how fitting it was that I should be the one take vengeance upon my mother’s murderer, and then enumerated my own best qualities in words I was too taken aback to commit to memory. Then she smoothly made the transition to enumerating our respective and quite complementary assets and liabilities in the coming struggle. By the time her pretty speech came to “together we can do what we alone cannot,” I was fairly certain she was about to propose marriage. To spare what was left of my manly dignity, I beat her to it.

Apparently I had misread her intent. Her startlement was not feigned, nor was the blush that spread over her cheeks, even though I had phrased the offer in reasonable and political terms.

She recovered her composure with admirable swiftness. “I was building toward restoring Highever to you,” she said wryly, “but if it’s Ferelden you want...”

“This is no coup,” I said. “I would not be king, but your consort. Ferelden would still be yours. But the match will make sense to the people. I make an excellent advisor and leader, we seem to get on well, and you know that if you do not marry someone with all haste to give your subjects hope of an heir, they’ll insist that you be replaced.”

“I see your point,” she said crisply. “And we do work well together. Very well then, on my honor, once we ensure my coronation, you shall have my hand.” She gave me her hand in the literal sense, to formally seal the agreement; it was as soft as a child’s and icy cold. “For now,” she said, “let us keep this quiet; there is too much still up in the air.”

Indeed there was, including the matter we had begun the morning with intent to discuss. With the matter of the crown settled between us, we spoke a bit more on what she had observed regarding the elven alienage, and then I left to gather a team to investigate in person. 

I made two stops before heading to the alienage: one to Bann Alfstanna and one to Bann Sighard, to inquire after their recently-imprisoned family members’ health. I did not need to mention the rescue, much less the Landsmeet; I had only to express my personal concern. In both cases, the grateful banns hadn’t even realized who had rescued their loved ones, and my inquiry tied all the threads together. Both promised me their support against Loghain at the Landsmeet. With two new votes squared away, I took my team to the alienage.

As with all else thus far, the queen’s instincts regarding the situation were disturbingly accurate. What was being passed off as a plague -- elves inexplicably being treated in quarantine by healers from Tevinter of all places -- was of course a method by which potentially valuable slaves were being separated from their families and smuggled out of the city. This outrage positively stank of Loghain and Howe.

I was able to rescue what the alienage refers to as their <<hahren,>> a sort of elder or leader, which should do much to settle the unrest there. But Maker’s breath, unfortunate reader, if you have never been to your city’s alienage, I suggest you visit there before you make any sweeping judgments about elves’ capacity for intelligence or morality. Imagine growing up in a place like that -- crowded together in filth, exhausted and malnourished, forbidden to carry weapons, treated like dogs by the guards who are supposed to protect you, periodically purged when your numbers grow too great -- and ask yourself just how productive a member of society you might become.

I am ashamed to admit that I have never set foot inside Highever’s alienage. It has never been required of me. But when all of this is over, one of the first things I shall do is investigate the place. If I do survive the Blight and become Queen Anora’s consort, I shall have to divide my time between Denerim and Highever, and under my watch, neither place will treat its elves in anything like the ways I have witnessed today.

There is a tree in the center of the Denerim alienage – the one place that is not caked with filth. It is a great oak, or an oak that would be great if it did not have to grasp desperately at light within the city walls. Its trunk has been lovingly painted, and candles burn at its base. I saw a ragged elf woman who appeared to be praying at it, and so I asked my self-appointed guide, a redhead named Shianni, to explain its meaning. She called it the <<vhenadahl,>> the “tree of the people,” and said that it was a symbol of the great lost city of Arlathan. It is where city elves go to remember their heritage, in defiance of those who have tried to strip it from them.

It is a bitter coincidence, at best, that the “quarantine” the Tevinter mages had set up was within throwing distance of that tree. So is the orphanage, an all-too-populated place that was not spared the recent purges Howe ordered in response to the recent unrest. The atrocities committed there were so unspeakable that the veil was torn, turning the orphanage into a haunted ruin.

This is why I cannot say that I was victorious today. I stopped the most recent and wretched of crimes committed against these people, but I arrived months too late, and did too little. Since Ostagar, nearly half the population of the alienage has been slaughtered or sold into slavery.

When we found the ringleader of the Tevinter slavers – a powerful blood mage – he tried to make a deal with me: he would cease business here and provide documents proving that Loghain had agreed to sell elves to fund his war. In return I was to let him leave in one piece and take his latest batch of “cargo” with him. Somewhat reluctant to confront a Tevinter blood mage, especially when he commanded a room full of trained archers, I made a counteroffer. He could take the money he had already earned and go, but he would have to leave his current “cargo,” including the alienage elder.

He decided he did not like those terms, as he had still not earned enough to pay for the trip. I told him there was no further room for negotiation, and so he attacked. Thank the Maker Morrigan was there, or we’d all be dead. As it was, I brought him to his knees with my sword at his throat and told him the new terms of the deal: he was to leave everything – documents, slaves, and coin – and in return he could walk out with his miserable life. He accepted my terms.

Ought I to have killed him? Zevran thinks so. But killing a man who begged my mercy would not so much as make a dent in the Tevinter slave trade, nor would it bring back those people he has already sold. In fact, with him still alive it may be possible to use him to trace and recover some of those who were lost. Furthermore, if the documentation does not serve as sufficient proof, he could be called upon as a witness to Loghain’s crimes.

Zevran suggested that I might feel differently if it had been humans he was selling. The fact that this is not true does not necessarily speak highly of me, and so I did not argue it. I worry sometimes that the very dispassion I value in myself as a leader and decision-maker may read as callous or evil to others. No one ever believes himself to be evil, so my insisting that I am not is meaningless. I suppose it is up to you, unfortunate reader, to decide that for yourself.

1 Firstfall

Location: Denerim  
Events: The Landsmeet

It occurs to me that I should stop addressing you as “unfortunate reader.” It is a habit from childhood, when I first began keeping a journal at the insistence of my tutor Aldous, Maker rest his soul. At the time, I was wise enough to know that any “posterity” who might be thumbing through the pages of a second son’s autobiography would either be a stranger attempting to compose some manner of eulogy, or a historian tasked with a particularly dull specialty.

But all that has changed, hasn’t it? What you hold in your hands, at whatever time you hold it, is the personal, handwritten account of not only a king-consort of Ferelden, but also the leader of the force that triumphed against the Fifth Blight. (If I did not triumph, no one will be alive to read this, and so I am safe in penning that projection.)

Today, more-fortunate-than-I-initially-estimated reader, you will be treated to a relatively accurate account of the events of the historic Landsmeet of 1 Firstfall, 9:30 Dragon. Filtered heavily, of course, through my own particular prejudices, but I shall leave you to sort those out.

We were somewhat late in arriving, thanks to all of the documentation I had to assemble to back up the accusations I was prepared to make. When we arrived, the Landsmeet was already in progress; I could hear Arl Eamon in the midst of a passionate speech. Of course Ser Cauthrien was planted outside the doors to the chamber with specific instructions to ensure that I did not, as she so colorfully phrased it, “desecrate” the proceedings.

My hands twitched for the hilts of my weapons – my night in Fort Drakon was still fresh in my memory – but I stilled my urge for violence and instead delivered a modified version of the speech I had prepared for the Landsmeet. She admitted that Loghain may have killed the king, but believed it was in defense of Ferelden. She blamed me for Loghain having to resort to selling slaves, as he’d had to empty the treasury fighting “my” civil war against him. 

I pointed out that the civil war she blamed me for was already well underway before Loghain knew I’d survived Ostagar. His pinning of the rebellion on me was an afterthought that served his interests, as were so many of his supposed principles. The will of the people was against him; all I was doing by making a case against him at the Landsmeet was showing that not everyone who stood against him was powerless and easily crushed. Fereldan law and tradition would rule, not the lies and schemes of one ambitious man.

Cauthrien faltered under my verbal onslaught in a way she had never seemed to quail before my blades. She admitted she’d had her doubts about Loghain’s state of mind. She said that when I spoke I sounded as Loghain had the day she swore to serve him to her last breath. It had been quite some time since she had heard that Loghain speak. With obvious inner turmoil she stepped aside, but begged me to show him mercy.

“Without Loghain,” she said, “there would be no Ferelden to defend.”

Her final words echoed in my mind as I entered the chamber. Even as Loghain sneered at my late arrival, I tried to see the legend he had once been, the man to whom everyone owed such a debt that they were desperate to believe he still had their best interests at heart. I discarded the caustic words I had prepared, realizing that they served only me, and not Ferelden.

I kept my account to facts that could be backed up via documentation or witnesses. I revealed that he had funded his war with slavery and that he had allowed Howe to torture nobles who opposed him. I revealed that he had poisoned Arl Eamon, and that both the apostate blood mage who performed the act and the templar from whose custody Loghain had seized the mage were both still alive (despite Howe and Loghain’s efforts to silence them) and able to testify.

I closed by saying that while we should hold Loghain in the highest respect for his past service to Ferelden, he was no longer that man. His recent actions demonstrated that power had eroded his sense of honor and that as self-appointed regent of Ferelden he was letting his personal fears and prejudices lead us down a dark path.

By not even bringing up Alistair, I took the teeth out of Loghain’s prepared arguments about Orlesian influence on Eamon and the Theirins. All I asked was that the people of Ferelden support the Grey Wardens in battling the Blight, that they support their beloved queen’s bid for uncontested rule of Ferelden, and that they remove Loghain from a position he had seized without the Landsmeet’s blessing.

With the exception of one cowardly noble, everyone in the room voted in support of Queen Anora and the Grey Wardens.

Bereft of even the veneer of legitimacy for his leadership, a wrathful, cornered Loghain resorted to the most ancient of Fereldan traditions: he challenged me to a duel.

Maker’s balls. Imagine me, in that moment, challenged to draw blades against a Fereldan legend in front of virtually the entire assembled nobility of the nation. He would have accepted a champion fighting on my behalf, but this had to be my victory if the people were to hold me in any respect.

I like to think that my experiences in the dwarven Provings helped prepare me for the moment. If I hadn’t had the prior experience of dueling a political rival in front of a highly reactive audience, that alone might have distracted me enough to end me. Because mark my words, Loghain had no intention of fighting me to the point of my surrender. I saw in his cold, stone-gray eyes that he meant to solve the problem of Aedan Cousland the way he’d solved all his problems since Ostagar.

Reader, I beg you to find the journal of someone else, anyone else, who was present that day to witness the fight. It must have been spectacular to watch, but I had no chance to appreciate it. Loghain may have been nearly twice my age, but he was relentless. Never in my life have I been so terrified in single combat. 

At the beginning, it looked as though Loghain would dispose of me quickly. I heard gasps and cries from the assembled crowd each time his blade came away red. I spent perhaps too much time dodging and feinting, trying to tire him out, before I realized that the man was driven by something beyond physical strength. There was nothing for it but to meet his unbending ferocity with fire of my own.

Of all people, I must thank Oghren. I called upon what he had taught me in camp these past months when he was sober enough to share his dwarven Warrior Caste training. I allowed myself to forget for a moment that I was a Cousland -- a civilized noble of the Landsmeet -- and instead I fought like a dwarf, an Ash Warrior, a damned werewolf.

The next thing of which I was fully aware was an anguished cry that sounded like my name. A woman’s voice. Queen Anora’s.

My vision cleared, and I saw Loghain on his knees on a wet red floor. I saw the arrested backswing of my main-hand blade, angled to sever his head from his shoulders. 

“He said he yields!” Tears choked Anora’s voice. “Aedan, please!” A shock went through me, and for a moment I froze, looking up at the bloodless faces of the assembled nobles. 

With shaking hands, I replaced my blades in their sheaths.

For a moment there was a silence so heavy I wondered that anyone could breathe through it. Then Loghain spoke, his voice rough-edged and weary.

“I thought you were a child playing at war,” he said, “like Cailan. But I think, after all, you remind me more of his father.”

A ripple of relief passed over the room; several women began to sob. I called for healers to attend the former regent, and once he had been stabilized the queen asked what was to become of him.

I didn’t know what to say. What does one do with a nation’s savior when he goes mad and commits treason of the highest order?

“Just kill him already!” blurted Alistair like an adolescent, making me thankful I had not staked my arguments on his legitimacy as Ferelden’s next king.

“Might I propose an alternative to his execution?” The slightly familiar Orlesian-accented voice must have made Loghain grind his teeth, despite the words. 

It was Riordan, the Warden I had rescued from Howe’s dungeon. He proposed we make Loghain submit to the Joining ritual, and Anora was quick to agree. She pointed out that many did not survive the ritual. If he did not, we had our execution. If he lived, we had an experienced general to help against the Blight.

Neither her reasoning nor her obvious sentiments were what swayed me; what I found most compelling was the profound sense of justice. Even an execution was not as painful a consequence for his actions as enduring an agonizing ritual that, at best, would cause him to become the thing had spent months fighting. I agreed.

Alistair was furious. He has not matured enough to give his rage any weight; it was the barking of a mid-sized dog, not the snarl of a wolf. But he was as angry as I have ever seen him. He insisted that being inducted into the Grey Wardens was meant to be an honor \-- as if he didn’t know damned well that Duncan had recruited a cutpurse right alongside me, as if Sofia Dryden hadn’t undergone the Joining after being accused of treason.

This wasn’t about the sanctity of the Wardens. It was about Alistair being unwilling to yield, unwilling to fight beside a man he deemed responsible for his father-figure’s death. 

Would I have allowed Howe to be recruited into the Wardens as an alternative to execution? Likely so, because I would never have bet on him surviving the Joining, and the horror of the experience would have made a fitting last moment. If he had survived, would I have fought beside him for the greater good? I like to think I would have. For the sake of my own self-respect, I am glad I need never find out.

When I did not yield and finish Loghain as Alistair demanded, Alistair tried to claim the crown simply to stop us from going through with Riordan’s suggestion. 

“Can you see what a disastrous king he’d be?” Anora cried out in response. If I had not seen it clearly enough before, I certainly did today. I stood firm. The Landsmeet had already chosen its ruler.

Alistair saw that he was defeated, and his heart broke. I could almost _hear_ it tear apart in his chest. “I thought we were friends,” he said. 

I had thought the same. And yet next to his own personal quest for revenge, he held that friendship, held the Grey Wardens, held Ferelden in contempt. He chose to surrender, to leave ending the Blight to Riordan and myself, rather than take the risk that our former enemy might survive to aid us.

Queen Anora opined that it was not safe to leave Alistair alive. She feared that in his anger he might start another civil war. I did not want to say in front of my already broken-hearted former friend that he could not induce a dog to follow him, much less an army, so instead I simply asked Anora, as a favor to me in repayment for her life, to settle for Alistair’s word that he would renounce the throne and leave Ferelden forever. They both agreed to his exile – she calmly, he bitterly – and Alistair left without so much as a backward glance.

I scarcely heard the stirring speech Anora began once he was gone. I was suddenly lost in memory: a clear recollection of a cold spring day, emerging from Flemeth’s hut in the Korcari Wilds and finding Alistair, his eyes wide with shock and relief that I had survived.

I had never been especially close to Alistair, but he was my first companion on this quest, and to watch him abandon it on the very cusp of victory filled me with a strange foreboding. I did my best to stand tall and look hopeful as people cheered, clasped my arm, saluted me.

Once the Landsmeet had officially concluded and I was able to return to Eamon’s estate, the first person I sought was Morrigan. Not for comfort – I know better – but to tell her all that had transpired. 

Morrigan was strangely calm, even amused, on the subject of my betrothal, which didn’t entirely surprise me. She never struck me as the sort to pay that sort of arrangement any mind. She could see as easily as I why my marriage to Anora was an ideal outcome, both for me and for Ferelden. What I wanted to ascertain, though, was whether she thought I ought to inform the queen about our relationship. I do not know Anora well enough to guess whether she would prefer to be informed or left in the dark about my personal matters. I wanted to sound Morrigan out first.

Morrigan advised me to say nothing, for now, to keep things simple until the Blight was defeated. “These things have a way of working themselves out,” she assured me. Reader, I cannot say that those words did anything to allay my general feeling of unease as we all prepare to face the Archdemon. 

We will be converging in Redcliffe to unite and prepare the various armies I’ve gathered. Before that, though, there is a Joining I must witness. If Loghain does not survive, I suppose the Wardens are no worse off than we were after Ostagar. Better, in fact. Riordan has experience and knowledge that Alistair lacked. 

And yet my heart does not rest easy at the thought of Loghain’s death in the way that it did with Howe’s. For a moment, after the battle – when he compared me to King Maric – I thought I saw another Loghain: a man I wished I might have known. A man I wish that Ferelden did not have to lose.

Perhaps I only wish it because I keenly feel the symbolism of having been the one to defeat him and win his daughter’s hand. The man to whom the Crows granted a faith they had once placed in him. If there is no Loghain Mac Tir, then I am the next Loghain Mac Tir.

And men of that sort, dear reader, do not end well.


End file.
